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.

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

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.

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.

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!

Grandma and Trivial Pursuit

This is a random memory that I had to put somewhere…

Many years ago, I played a game of Trivial Pursuit with Grandma. As sometimes happens, we struck a run of questions on a particular topic. Grandma had no trouble with this particular topic at all.

Of course, I knew she was better placed to answer trivial historical questions than I was. Many of them were from her lifetime. Still, it seemed odd to me that she would be so knowledgeable about early 2oth century Australian boxers! Yes, boxers. Not the dogs, not the underwear (at least not that she ever told me about), but people who punch each other.

I asked her how she did so well on those questions. Was she a closet boxing fan? The simple answer was that she knew the people in the questions. If only I could remember now who they were and just what she told me! All I recall is that all her answers were along the lines of “well so-and-so lived down the road from me and I used to see them at…”.

I guess if I want to pursue this trivia further I will have to dig out the relevant edition of Trivial Pursuit and start flipping through the cards... What’s the Evidence Explained source citation for that?!

If only I had taken note of what she said at the time. I might have been able to tell Sharon something about Jimmy Semmens…