finding 'lost' websites via Google

jmurphy · Post by **jmurphy** » 11 Oct 2008 18:13

By means of an off-topic posting in the FHUG mailing list on RootsWeb, I was alerted to the fact that Hugh Wallis' excellent website devoted to searching the IGI by batch number has been taken down by Ancestry.

Let's say you are researching a particular village and want to retrieve Hugh's page with the list of batch numbers for that village.

If you go to Google and search for IGI Batch and the name of the town, at the moment the search result will still come up. If you click on the live link, you get the 'we can't find this page' page on Ancestry/RootsWeb. But if you click on the link that says 'cache' (at least right now), you'll see a copy of the page that Google saved a couple of days ago, which you can save for yourself (I use the Firefox extensions Scrapbook and Zotero) or print out.

The links on the page will not work (they'll take you straight back to the 'this page is missing' error page on RootsWeb) but at least you can save a copy of the page to have a list of the batch numbers, which you can then plug into FamilySearch on your own.

If you want to do an advanced search, you can put

Code: Select all

site:freepages.genealogy.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~hughwallis/

into the search and then add the search terms you want, and the search result for the place should come up.

From the postings I've read, it's not clear to me if Hugh will be able to regain access to his pages or if the site will be restored anytime soon. I don't know how long the older pages will persist in Google's cache, but this way, at least some of Hugh's work can be saved.

Jan

ID:3070

ejp · Post by **ejp** » 12 Oct 2008 03:47

I attempted this & got a supposed antivirus program attempting to install itself.
Caution required I think!

gerrynuk · Post by **gerrynuk** » 12 Oct 2008 09:56

Yes, I was just about to show someone how to use Hugh Wallis's web pages when I discovered the site was down. However, you can still get to it via:

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

by putting in the old link:

http://freepages.genealogy.rootsweb.com/~hughwallis/

Works a treat!

Gerry

gerrynuk · Post by **gerrynuk** » 12 Oct 2008 15:13

A postscript - the archived web site will give you the Batch Numbers for each parish but clicking on the link won't work with the archived version of the site.

However, when you have found the Batch Number you want, go to:

http://www.familysearch.org.uk

and using the Advanced Search, select the International Genealogical Index; select the Region - British Isles and put in the Batch Number. You can then search for your chosen name or leave the name blank and see all the records in that batch. You can refine the seach to a particular period by putting in a Year and selecting Year Range.

Gerry

jmurphy · Post by **jmurphy** » 14 Oct 2008 06:09

ejp said:
I attempted this & got a supposed antivirus program attempting to install itself.
Caution required I think!

Do you recall which page was infected?

Jan

ejp · Post by **ejp** » 14 Oct 2008 07:19

I pasted off what was said at 'Code', but did not add additional search terms which is what you were trying to point out.
This immediately produced a supposed scan & download. I could not detect anything but Ad-aware had been crippled so I recovered using system restore.

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