Have you ever been searching for information about an ancestor and came across a website that is no longer accessible? Just the other day the information I desperately needed was in RootsWeb, and Ancestry.com has locked up this valuable resource because of security reasons. I used the Wayback Machine (web.archive.org ) to find the information I needed. It was pretty slick. The Wayback Machine is time travel for genealogists!
The Wayback machine is great for recovering lost information from the internet and especially information locked up in RootsWeb. In the search bar on the Wayback Machine’s home page, you enter the URL or words related to a site’s homepage. The Wayback Machine has over 505 billion archived web pages dating back to 1996. This machine crawls through the web taking snapshots of websites every so often.
Internet archive is making it easier to access archived versions of dead web pages. It now has an add-on for the Google Chrome browser. If you land on a web page that gives you an error code such as “page not found” or “404,” this extension will query the Wayback Machine to check for anything in the archives.
The Wayback Machine can be a lifesaver if you have on an old web link that no longer works or “link rot” as many have put it. Link rot does not just happen to websites; it happens to our citations also. Our citations should lead us back to where we found our information and if we included the URL and it has changed then we have problems with our citations.
It is important to remember that the Web is not permanent. An article that you regularly refer to can suddenly vanish. If the item was valuable to your research, it is best to print it up or take a screenshot of your article and save it to your computer or the cloud or even share the article with other family members. Be sure to include the URL in case you need to access an archived version through the Wayback Machine.
If you come across the “page not found” message, be sure and try the Wayback Machine to find an archive of the page you need. If you don’t have the URL, you can still do a keyword search and find the information that you need. No more lost information!
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