I’m still on my genealogy buzz this week, and may have finally discovered a birth cert for an elusive ancestor, which makes me very happy. However, when I went poking around my bookmarks from a couple of years’ back for other sites that would help me fill in some gaps, I discovered that one of my favourites (that harboured lovingly transcribed lists of births, marriages and burials from my hometown) was no more – disaster! U
But then I reminded myself that there were a couple of ways that the good ol’ internet would allow me to see the ghosts of dead websites, so the hunt was back on.
First off, there’s looking at cached pages in search results on Google. (Other search engines may do this also, but since I usually default to Google, that’s what I’m going to describe.)
In this case, enter search terms for your web page as usual, and when you find a result for the dead page you’re after: 1 – click the little chevrons to the right of the result to preview the page (in the case illustrated, the preview shows a “Temporarily Unavailable” message), then, 2 – click the link labelled Cached just above the preview to see what was there the last time Google looked.
Unfortunately, if the cached page you get has links to other pages on the same website, they will be proper links to the live site, and if the site is down, they will fail too, so you’ll either have to somehow get each page to show up in Google’s search results, or move on to my next web-timetravel resource: the Wayback Machine on archive.org!
Enter the URL for the site/page you’re after in the search field, then click Take Me Back.
The search results show a timeline of when snapshots were taken of the page/site, and a calendar of specific dates. Navigate to the one you want, click and away you go. All internal links on the pages will work as though you were visiting that website on your chosen date.
Thanks to this wondrous website, I can once again access the precious data that I hope will let me finally figure out who some of my ancestors are.
