Branching Out: GENDEX Logs Off

GENDEX (formerly located at <www.gendex.com>), a genealogy index site and three-time pick for Family Tree Magazine‘s 101 Best Web Sites, shut down April 22 after eight years in business.

The site indexed more than 22,000 online databases of information on 60 million people, so users could search many Web sites without visiting each one. GENDEX itself wasn’t a database of family tree files, though, so there’s little original genealogical information to miss.

Webmaster Gene Stark decided to go offline in part because of time and cost (the site wasn’t ad-supported). And he points out that most of the data GENDEX indexed came from just two Web sites, anyway. “The original concept for GENDEX was a portal that would provide a unified point of access to a large number of databases spread throughout the Web, that would otherwise be hard to find and search systematically,” Stark says. But an analysis showed that 85 percent of the indexed information was from GenCircles <www.gencircles.com>, and another 5 percent came from My-Ged.com <www.my-ged.com>.

Stark’s GED2HTML shareware, which translates GEDCOM files to HTML for posting online, still is available from <www.starkeffect.com:80/ged2html>.

From the August 2004 issue of Family Tree Magazine.