THE ANN ARBOR NEWS / Monday, Dec. 9, 2002

Politicians don't have to be dead to be on Larry Kestenbaum's Web site, but it helps.

The Ann Arbor man's love of history, politics and statistics nurtured a fledgling idea that has turned into an internationally popular site that draws more than a million hits a month.

Kestenbaum has merged history interests, his fascination with cemeteries and his savvy with computers to create a mammoth Web site that lists more than 107,000 politicians, judges and diplomats. The resource tells where they were born, where they died, what office they served and where they are buried, along with assorted pertinent facts, such as if they died in a duel or served in the Peace Corps.

The Political Graveyard (politicalgraveyard.com) has grown tremendously since 1996, when Kestenbaum, who works at the Institute for Social Research at the University of Michigan, first posted it on the World Wide Web.

Kestenbaum bills it as "the Internet's most comprehensive source of U.S. political biography." People have told him it's a national treasure.

It began innocently enough, said Kestenbaum, a retiring Washtenaw County commissioner. Friends had a server and asked him if he wanted to create a web page. "At first, I resisted," he said. "I thought it would be a waste of bandwidth."

But he gave in and began creating pages of topics that interested him: a page for Charles Jencks, a social theorist, and one for historical cemeteries, a subject that fascinated him since the days when his father took him to Lansing-area cemeteries to trace the history of local Jews.

"Back in 1996, there really wasn't much history out there (on the Web). For instance, you couldn't find anything on Henry Clay. Now, there's a lot on Henry Clay," Kestenbaum said. "It was really a pretty modest start."

As his pages evolved, an idea hit. "As an undergraduate, I remember coming across the biographical directory of the U.S. Congress," Kestenbaum said. "It listed 12,000 people who had served in Congress. At the time, I thought you could make some interesting statistics with that. So it seemed a natural leap to create a database with this information.

"I'm a database guy," he said.

It took him a couple of months to write the programs that allowed him to put the information on his site. On July 1, 1996, The Political Graveyard was born.

He soon learned he had an audience, and that some members of that audience were willing to send him more information. He added information of presidents and vice presidents, Cabinet members and Supreme Court members. Then it was on to state governments. He used the eBay auction site to purchase 700 volumes of official state manuals listing state officeholders.

"A woman sent me a list of all the delegates who attended the 1869 Democratic and Republican national conventions."

Soon Kestenbaum began to interconnect parts of the site. In addition to being listed in alphabetical order, politicians are cross-referenced, taking a site visitor on a seemingly endless roller-coaster ride through American history.

For instance, click on the alphabetized list for Abraham Lincoln and find a link for log cabins, which takes you to a page listing all the politicians born in log cabins. In another spot, you find a link to James Garfield, which leads to another page on U.S. presidents and vice presidents. Browse to George Washington and you can click on a link under Washington's name for U.S. currency and you'll transfer to a page listing all politicians on coins and bills.

And it's not just dead politicians anymore. Politicians still living are on the list. Kestenbaum has scores of ways to list politicians: Those who were born into slavery (16), won the Pulitzer Prize (16) or died in duels (17). He has politicians who survived assassination attempts (14), who died of cholera (14), and who won an Olympic medal (6).

Today, The Political Graveyard lists 19,000 pages, Kestenbaum said. He's seen only a fraction of them. "People imagine that I built the site by hand, brick by brick," Kestenbaum said. It would have been impossible to enter all the data by hand. Instead, he writes the computer programs that allows him to add the steady stream of new information.

It's used by historians, librarians and genealogists.

Patricia Majher was surfing the Web, looking for cemeteries in her hometown in Bay County. The Ann Arbor woman chanced upon The Political Graveyard. And while she found a list of cemeteries near where she grew up, she was drawn into the site. "I got caught up in it. I found information on Gov. Engler's first wife, who was from Bay City. I liked the way it is organized. It's really engaging."

Chicago resident Matt Hucke is among the users of the site, using it to plot visits to cemeteries near his home, where he looks for graves of politicians or other well-known people. "I'm interested in graveyards for several reasons," he said. "I am an admirer of classical architecture and stonework. I like the solitude and the quiet. ... and you can feel connected to the past. Everyone has read about Al Capone, but how many people have actually stood on top of him? I have."

Early on, Kestenbaum's site won several awards, including the "Pick of the Web" award from Yahoo, the Internet search engine, and it was cited by The Washington Post and USA Today. The attention was enough to spur Kestenbaum on.

"I have done a lot of things, but I've never done something that's gotten so much positive feedback," Kestenbaum said. "I'm getting praise for doing something that's fun. That's reinforcing."

Today, there's a handful of banner ads on the site, advertising that brings in less than $100 a month. He makes even less from the links to Amazon.com for book sales.

"I did not create the site to make money," Kestenbaum said. "I do it because it uses a lot of my skills. I get a tremendous amount of reinforcement. I get fan mail every day."