Cyndi Howells: Mastermind of CyndisList
By Birdie Holsclaw

Cyndi Howells is one of genealogy's most popular speakers, and her Cyndi's List is one of the most popular genealogical sites on the Internet, reaching the landmark of 20 million visitors in March 2001. As this issue was going to press, her list contained over 123,000 links to genealogical resources throughout the world.

We spoke at the 2001 FGS Conference in Davenport, Iowa, during that most memorable week in recent history, as conference attendees were jolted by the news of terrorist attacks. Cyndi reflected on the strength of the genealogical community, saying "We're a tight-knit community, and we're all supportive of each other. On the first days of the conference [September 11 and 12], when we found out many of the speakers weren't going to be able to get here ... everybody stepped forward and volunteered time and services."

Cyndi's role in this community is unique, and requires an enormous amount of work. When she first started working on Cyndi's List, she gave little or no thought to how much work would be involved. Only gradually did the realization sink in about how much work it had become. When asked if she works forty hours a week, she replied, "More. Seven days a week. I work on it every day, 8 to 12 hours each day. Every once in a while, though, I'll take a day off." But even while she was away from home, and focusing on world events and her responsibilities during the conference, she kept up with e-mail.

The Evolution of Cyndi's List
"In the beginning, it was just me. The site went online March 4, 1996." At first, Cyndi's List was on one Web page and had about a thousand links. Her pages were on a personal site hosted by Oz.net. "I think I was allowed 5 Meg of space."

It wasn't long before someone wrote and complained that the page was taking too long to download. Cyndi started thinking about how the page could be split up, and began coming up with ideas about how to split it up into categories.

By February 1998, Cyndi's List had outgrown Oz.net. "I was already up to 12 meg, and I wanted to automate certain parts of the site-to have CGI scripts, and that kind of thing, which I wasn't allowed on the personal site at Oz.net."

The solution came from RootsWeb. Cyndi recalls, "Brian Leverich [a founder of RootsWeb] said 'Why don't you move over to RootsWeb? You can have as much space as you want, and you can have things like scripts and automated processes.' And at that same time, Sierra Online approached me about sponsoring the site."

Cyndi registered cyndislist.com as a domain name.

Cyndi spent time with a programmer on the Sierra Online staff who took her design ideas and turned them into scripts for automating and customizing the site.

"For example, when you fill out the script for submitting a new link, it's sent to me by e-mail, but it's also coded ahead of time with all the HTML code," she explains. "It's also put into an e-mail that's sent to my mailing list, a batch e-mail with all the links for the last 24 hours. And it's put onto a Web page, in no particular order. So it's put in about three different places."

Other scripts save Cyndi time in fixing broken links, and in graphically highlighting New and Updated links.

"Before, people would just write to me that one of my links was broken, and I'd have to work hard to figure out where they found that broken link."

Now, a user can click on Report a Broken Link and see a regenerated version of the same page with "broken link" graphics. He or she can then click on the graphic and receive a form to fill out.

Cyndi told me that people wanted to know when a link was new, but it was a request that was more difficult to accomplish than one might think. She said, "I add one or two hundred links every day. To keep track of when I put one on and when I should take it off is a whole other job unto itself-just to add that little graphic!"

In time, a programmer at Sierra created a script so Cyndi could add the date to indicate when a link had been added. The script reads the date and automatically puts up the "New" graphic-automated every night-for 30 days, after which it removes the graphic.

She explained that another script created by a Sierra programmer counts all the links for her, and on the front page where it says, for instance, the census category was lasted updated on August 31st, it is automated as well. In the first couple of years, Cyndi physically counted the links as she went.

"You can imagine when the programmer came along, it was wonderful!" she says. "It was like night and day."

SierraHome, makers of Generations software, still sponsors Cyndi's site. "It's an exclusive sponsorship, so the company has banners across the whole site. Some of the banners are automated, placed by a third party. I wanted to make sure nothing too obnoxious was going to show up. There was one that was questionable: Psychic Love Readings. I called the guy and said 'At least make them Psychic Genealogy Readings. Could we take those off?' and they did."

Cyndi's List Today
Even with the help of scripts from Sierra, Cyndi could not keep up with the rapid growth of genealogy on the Internet. After two years at RootsWeb, she had a backlog of 12,000 submitted links, and a buildup of broken-link reports.

"I couldn't keep up!" she says.

When Cyndi signed a new contract with Sierra, she said, "I need help, I'm falling way behind. Could you hire somebody to help me?"

So Sierra hired a part-time assistant, Michele Ingle, to help with the site. She is Cyndi's sister-in-law, so Cyndi knew she could trust her abilities. "She's just as obsessive-compulsive about paying attention to every detail as I am, so I knew she would be really good. And she's a computer whiz!"

Cyndi's husband, Mark, began helping two or three times a week beginning in mid-2000, when Michele had to take some time off. In addition, Mark has always helped as one of Cyndi's expert consultants.

"He's an English researcher, and he's got a lot more expertise in English and the U.K. than I do," she explains.

Cyndi has turned all the broken link reports over to Michele. "She's gone through page by page, alphabetically, and run LinkBot, a link-checking software, on each page. She'll run it on the Acadian page, and fix the broken links, and then the Adoption page, and fix those. She's gone through the site-some 490 Web pages-three or four times."

Rather than simply deleting the invalid links, an attempt is made to find new URLs [Universal Resource Locator, or more simply, the Internet address]. Using search engines and other techniques, Cyndi claims that about 90 to 95 percent of the time, you can fix them.

Cyndi laughed as she discussed a common source of broken links. "Libraries do it, societies do it, everybody's done it! They get some new Web designer or webmaster who decides that it's time to redesign the whole site, and they'll change every file name, every directory name, and generally rearrange the entire site. And I have to go through page by page and try to fix every link I've got." If she can figure out the new naming convention, she can save time by using find and replace.

When asked about her best sources for links, other than submissions, Cyndi said, "Fellow genealogists, and librarians, and that sort of thing. Oh, and search engines-I use search engines to go find things." For instance, in response to a request for information on Luxembourg, she promised to try to find more beyond the handful of links on the Western Europe page. Using search engines, she was able to find about 20 more. She now has a separate page for Luxembourg.

"Sometimes I ask experts for information, like my South Africa page. Conrod Mercer is a leader in the Genealogical Society of South Africa. He's e-mailed me a few times about various things, so when I decided it was time to build a category for South Africa, I asked him to read the page and tell me if there was anything inappropriate or anything I had missed."

Cyndi uses a variety of resources to help build her site. "When it comes to foreign language sites, I just have to do my best. I'll go to the AltaVista translator, put in the URL, and read the translation to see if I can get an idea of what the page is about, so I know where to put it." For other searches, she uses Google, combining terms such as Luxembourg with Genealogy, Library, and Archives.

Cyndi visits every submitted site to check it out. Many pages that are submitted are not actually about genealogy, and she must spend some time each day keeping the list "scrubbed" of pornographic and other non-genealogical links. Early warnings about these often come from European users, who are the first to see links that were automatically created by the scripts overnight.

Ethical Issues
Cyndi has occasionally removed genealogically related links if there is an ethical problem, but she tries not to be a censor. Just as a librarian does not censor books in the library, she feels that she must not do that either. The site carries disclaimers, including "The owner is not responsible for the content found on other Web sites" and "The owner will not knowingly link to sites that derive from or participate in fraudulent or illegal behavior." She has removed links to sites whose creators have plagiarized her site, or who have added insulting language to their submissions.

"I do not link to any sites that sell 'your family crest' on a sheet, or on a plaque, or that stuff," she says.

Cyndi has only a few links on the Heraldry page, mostly to universities where there is a scholarly study of heraldry, not coats of arms merchants.

Cyndi has had submissions by seemingly professional genealogists who don't spell genealogy correctly, which she handles on a case-by-case basis. If they are only offering to perform simple services such as photocopying at the library, she will often go ahead and list them. If she receives complaints, she investigates, and if there is a general consensus in the community that there is a problem with a researcher or a site, she will remove the links.

Organizing the Site
Cyndi spends a great deal of time thinking about categories-what to call them, and how to organize them. When asked if she ever thought of herself as a cataloger or a librarian, she agreed, "Yes, I do. I don't have formal librarian training, but someone told me I must have been a librarian in a past life."

The categories are purposely informal. There is a combination of traditional genealogy terms, plus terms that are related to the Internet and other new technologies, such as "chat," "newsgroups," and so on. If a genealogist cannot find listings by using categories, Cyndi provides a link to three separate search engines, Freefind, Atomz, and Google, which provide search capabilities on the site.

How often does she add a new category? "All the time," she says.

"Just recently, I added a category about Scanners and one about Scrapbooks. I had a page called Photographs & Memories. It started out as a set of links about preserving and restoring photos, but as people started using the Internet and putting more pictures online, I started thinking about scanners."

She subdivided the Photographs category, and gave Scanners its own page.

Although Cyndi doesn't complain about having to rearrange links for sites that have been reorganized, she is very conscientious about not inflicting that sort of problem on people who have links and bookmarks to her site.

When asked if she ever changed her mind about how categories are divided, she said, "Sometimes, but once a category has been established, I try to keep it in place because otherwise people would have broken links and bookmarks. I've got a couple of file names on the site that are really stupid-ones that I created back when I first started the site, and I thought they were logical names at the time-but I've left them that way."

However, when a page gets very large she is forced to consider breaking it up into separate pages. She has recently started moving all the county links for each state onto a separate page. For other subjects, such as Croatia, there are so few sites available that separate categories are not warranted.

The surnames and personal Web pages create a separate problem because some of the sites are devoted to one surname, and others are not. A site about one family, like "Descendants of John Adams" is filed under Adams. In contrast, there are personal sites where a researcher has information about several families, in which case Cyndi alphabetizes it using the title supplied by the researcher. In an extreme case, if the site is titled "My Ancestry" it gets listed under M.

Cyndi has tried hard to arrange things so that the entire site can be reached from the front page, so the user need not click and click to navigate through the site. But as the site expands, more layers of links may become inevitable.

An Educator
When asked about delivering lectures, Cyndi declared, "I like teaching. That's what I feel like I'm doing. Rather than lecturing, I'm teaching. I help on mailing lists quite a bit. Some people tell me they didn't realize there were railroad records, for example. So when they see my railroad records category on the site, they learn something."

She gave her first lecture in 1995. "Once I stood up in my society and talked about the Internet, from that point on, I was the Internet expert. I started doing a Saturday class locally, and then I did a couple of classes at the Heritage Quest library, and then Seattle's group, and it just kind of went from there."

Soon she was asked to do a seminar in Anchorage, Alaska, and others followed. Today, she is a frequent presenter at national conferences, and at seminars throughout the United States and internationally.

Her Other Life
"I think my site is as popular as it is because I'm a genealogist first." This gives her insight into terminology, ethics, and other issues. But when asked if she had time to do her own genealogy, Cyndi said, "I haven't had time! The last couple of times we were in Salt Lake City or Fort Wayne for conferences, I did get some research in, but I haven't had time for my own in a long time."

"You know how it is. You get involved in societies, or in the community, and you don't have time for your own work. You have to make time if you're going to do it."

Cyndi takes breaks from work to play with Evan, her four-year-old son who recently started pre-kindergarten. When she wants to relax, she turns to reading. "I like historical reading. Right now, I'm reading a book about the Tudors, non-fiction." She laughed as she described how difficult it is to take her mind off Cyndi's List at night, "So, I've been reading a lot of trashy romance novels-historical ones-and that will put me to sleep pretty quick."

Rewards of Work
Cyndi recalls how she began to realize that Cyndi's List was going to be her contribution to genealogy.

"I have absolutely no interest in doing research for others," she says. "And yet, when I went online and started building the Web site, I kept adding to it. I really enjoyed doing that, and I felt like it was a way I could help others in our community in a way that was unique to me."

When asked if she had to work at not getting burned out, Cyndi answered, "Sometimes, yes. Every once in a while I start to get a little burned out when there's a problem. It's been really hard to have people plagiarize my site, or find copyright infringement of my site, that sort of thing. And I think, why am I even doing this? Especially if I've been putting off other things that I'd like to do.

"But it seems to me that just about every time that happens, I get an e-mail from someone that will be just the nicest e-mail you've ever read. They'll say they used the site, and now they're so excited, and they just wanted to tell me how wonderful it was. It's almost like they timed it, or it was a bit of fate or divine intervention or whatever. And then I say, 'Okay, so this is why I'm here' and it brings my focus back."