Particularly for Rootsweb right now…
The Rootsweb website and all of its vast genealogical resources — taken offline by Ancestry in December because of a data breach — remains offline and inaccessible to researchers here well into the New Year.
Now The Legal Genealogist is well aware that, for some of the Rootsweb resources, there are available alternatives and the lack of access right this minute isn’t devastating.
But for much of those resources — and particularly the huge array of information in family pages by individual researchers and family groups — there simply isn’t any real alternative resource out there.
So the inability to access these pages is hampering us, right now, in a very real way.
And that leaves us with only two choices, doesn’t it? We can sit around at 3 a.m. in our bunny slippers and curse the hackers who caused the data breach, the Ancestry security system that hasn’t figured out how to get the data back online safely yet, the fates and more.
Or we can go back in time.
Back to the time before the breach… when the data was available online.
No, I haven’t invented a time machine.1 But the sharp cookies at Internet Archive have.
It’s called the Wayback Machine.
And we can use it to access a whole bunch of those now-offline Rootsweb sites until Ancestry gets its act together and gets the site back online.
As the website explains, the Wayback Machine allows us to “Explore more than 310 billion web pages saved over time.”2 Any site that’s ever been searched by the service may have a version sitting there that we can still get to. This won’t be everything from Rootsweb, and in many cases the version available will be out of date, but it will be quite a bit — and that’s better than nothing.
Here’s how it works.
First, we need the web address — the URL — of a page we want to look at. So we’re going to need to use our favorite search engine, such as Google or Bing or — for genealogy — a search engine like the one at Family History Daily or any of the other specialized search engines listed on Cyndi’s List.
By searching for Rootsweb Davenport family on Google, for example, I come up with a bunch of options. For now, I’m going to skip over the ones where the web address shown begins with “wc.rootsweb.ancestry.com” — in general, I found that those weren’t available through the Wayback Machine. But there are some where the web address begins with “resources.rootsweb.ancestry.com” or with “freepages.genealogy.rootsweb.ancestry.com”.
If you find one of those for a family page you want to access, copy the URL. Now be careful here. Don’t right click and choose copy link location or whatever your browser says. Because you’ll get a very long web address that only the search engine uses. Instead, you need to actually highlight the web address shown (usually by holding down your left mouse button as you drag the mouse across the link) and copy it (with a Windows machine, CTRL+C).
For what’s shown as the Davenport Families 1086 – 1944, that gives me a web address of
“freepages.genealogy.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~dav4is/ODTs/DAVENPORT.shtml.”
Now take that over to the Wayback Machine and paste it into the box there, and then click on the button for Browse History.
Voila. You will find that that page has been searched and saved 19 times between 2008 and 2017.
Choose one of the colored circles on one of the calendars shown, click on that, and it’ll take you to a saved version of that web page.
Pretty cool, huh?
Now… for the other sites, the ones that the Wayback Machine can’t find, look on your search engine to see if it has a cached version. For example, when I tried to find the Davenport-McRoberts Family pages shown in that Google search, they turned out to have been cached:
Use that dropdown arrow on the right to open the button for the cached page, and then click on that.
And voila again. The page that was saved by Google will open.
I know this isn’t perfect. I know we all want Rootsweb back up and running. I know not everything will be found using either of these methods.
But something of what we need is available… and something is better than nothing.
And better than cursing the fates.
SOURCES
- If I had, trust me, my first use of it would be to find my rascal second great grandfather George and force him, under penalty of excruciating consequences, to reveal the identities of his parents. And my second use of it would be to find my second great grandmother Friedricke and force her, under penalty of equally excruciating consequences, to tell me who fathered her child, my great grandfather Hermann. ↩
- “Wayback Machine,” Internet Archive (https://archive.org/web/ : accessed 8 Jan 2018). ↩
“…something is better than nothing” – very true. A couple of other limitations when using Wayback Machine: many photos are not archived (or may appear only occasionally) and search boxes may not work (since the code page or scripts may not have been archived).
There are all kinds of frustrations using a system like this, so it’s really not a substitute for bringing the overall Rootsweb resources back online. But… in the interim… “…something is better than nothing.”
Just on a point of information Judy. Not ALL Rootsweb mailing lists have been shutdown. Certainly many of the lists I was/am subscribed to are publishing list updates (for unavailability or lack of new material – I don’t know) but I know of at least 5 which have been / are still posting. Three are Canadian Provincial topics, one is a Great War list (supposedly International, but mainly British) and one England County list (Devon.)
All of these lists are traditional – and continue to be (relatively) – well used, where the missing ones were “periodic” at their best.
I haven’t checked their archives so I can’t comment on their availability, but there ARE still a few active lists out there.
The mailing lists themselves were not supposed to be shut down at all in the Rootsweb hiatus, though it’s clear that some have been impacted. The access problem is in the free pages and family pages that are also part of Rootsweb.
The mailing lists are working, but the archives aren’t.
Sigh… the sooner they get this fixed, the better…
Such a valuable post. There used to me a newsletter on the Lamb families, which then migrated to a website called http://www.lambsite.com, which the petered out about 2004 but is accessible through the Wayback Machine (love that name!) at archive.org. The information held there is still very valuable to researchers so I refer many there.
It is such a great tool.
What a timely post for me! I was just trying to access listsearches.rootsweb.com only to discover the Rootsweb security issue, etc. — y’know, I always forget about the Wayback Machine! Thanks for the tip.. found what I needed!
Glad the reminder is helping!
I often use the Wayback Machine. It is a favorite resource when looking for things that have been “removed” from the internet including my own Geocities site of years ago. I have recovered a number of things from the Internet Archive.
It’s certainly a resource we can all make good use of!
The world needs WorldConnect.
I certainly don’t disagree. Hoping the site comes back — and fast!
The Internet Wayback machine should not be confused with the real WABAC time machine from the Rocky and Bullwinkle show. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WABAC_machine
Moose and Squirrel!!! One of my favs…
f.y.i. The voice of Natasha and Rocky passed away in July 2017.
http://www.cnn.com/2017/07/27/celebrities/june-foray-dies-obituary/index.html
Judy, you have some great tips and this is one of them.
When I started out, tips like this were only available from a group of like minded people – a genealogical or family history society.
These days we have Facebook, Yahoo and other groups also.
Point is – join a group.
Make it a New Year’s resolution you can actually keep.
Lots of options — and alternatives. We need to use them all!
That’s prett cool. I didn’t even know that you could do that. Thank you.
Another cool aspect of Wayback Machine is that you can ensure any webpage you cite (that allows crawlers) is available forever.
To prevent a future broken link in a citation: just click the beige Wayback Machine button (the one that contains the URL search box), scroll down to the bottom right for the “save page now” box, and insert the URL of the webpage you want to preserve.
On average, a webpage only exists for 100 days before it is changed or deleted…not anymore. 😉
Brilliant idea. Two cheers for the Wayback Machine. I hope Ancestry gets everything back online soon.