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Monday, October 12, 2015

Way back in the Wayback

Inspired by Jill Ball’s post on Geniaus “The Wonderful Wayback”, I decided to see if I could find my first family history website in the Internet Archive’s “Wayback Machine”. I couldn’t remember the URL, but I knew it was a free page on Rootsweb. With that information, I was able to quite quickly navigate to the page.

I appear to have created my first family history page in February 2000. It was captured 25 times by the Wayback Machine, from 2000 to 2005.

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The front page had a brief welcome message, and a link to the real content of the site.

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The real content was an ancestors narrative report generated in HTML format across several pages by my family history software. It didn’t include source information, but did include this statement:

“The information comes from a variety of sources which, if it was correct to begin with, I may have misread, misinterpreted or mistyped. I would be grateful for any corrections or new information.”

I’ve made quite a few corrections and added a lot of new information since then!

I created the site a few years before I was married, accordingly it was in my maiden name.

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The page notes that it was generated by EasyTree from SierraOnline. This had me a little puzzled as I didn’t remember “EasyTree”. It seems “Generations” was actually called “Generations EasyTree”.

A few of the pictures were captured by the Wayback Machine, but most had only empty boxes in their place.

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It wasn’t very lively, was it?!

I did have a few cousin contacts from the site, so it served its purpose.

I don’t seem to have ever updated it after my first upload in 2000. I recall that I did try but the links didn’t work the same way when I generated the pages again and it all seemed too difficult. I deleted the page in 2005 and didn’t create another space for myself online until I started this blog in mid-2009.

Thanks Jill for the prompt to walk down memory lane!

3 comments:

  1. Thanks for the post Shelley. I'll have to go Way back and take a look.

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  2. Thanks for the post Shelley. I'll have to go Way back and take a look.

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  3. Hi Shelley I must do a wander back too. I wasn't online as early as you, my first was in 2009.

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