Technology Tuesday~Web Page not Found and The Wayback Machine

Over the years, as we do on-line genealogy research, we collect a lot of Web addresses pointing to the webpages where we acquired our information.

Have you ever gone back to look at these pages only to find they no longer exist? You get this instead of the webpage you was expecting.

 

If you have, there may be some hope of finding your missing webpage. Back in 1996, two brilliant guys by the names of Brewster Kahle and Bruce Gilliat developed software that would “crawl “ the internet and catalogued all webpage. This in turn led to the “Wayback Machine” or the Internet Archive.

The Internet Archive is a digital archive of the World Wide Web. It can be access here: WAYBACK MACHINE

http://archive.org/web/web.php



When the Wayback Machine portal comes up be aware that the “http://” is already in place.

As an example for this article, the website below no longer exists and it was a valuable resource in my genealogy research:

 http://www.eosdev.com/rivers/rivers.html

This is a site created by a distant cousin and it documents the family history of the Matthew and Mary Prince Rivers.

With this web page we want to enter > www.eosdev.com/rivers/rivers.html < into the line above at the top of the WAYBACK MACHINE webpage and then CLICK on “Take Me Back”.



After you click on “Take Me Back” you will get a page that looked like this.



This is the key to finding a copy of the webpage that you are looking for. The little strip that looks like a “Barcode” near the top of the page indicates when a  snapshot of the webpage was made.
The second indicator is that the date will be “BOLD” for any snapshot taken.

This particular image for Jan-Aug 2010 indicates that no snapshot was taken and no archives are available.
In the next image I clicked on  a dark section of the strip for 2005

 

Now you can see that 2005 is colored at the top and on the calendar “the blur bold date” indicates snapshots were taken on:
10 Mar 2005
12 Apr 2005
6 Sept. 2005
28 Dec 2005

The next action you want to take is to click on one of those highlighted dates.

I clicked on the 6 Sept date and my cousin’s webpage came up.



Once you get this page up, just click on any of the hyperlinks on the page and you should be taken to that link/page if it exist.

I do hope this tutorial was clear and helpful to your research.

If you have any questions leave me a message or send me an e-mail.





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[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wayback_Machine