Blog 24: Using the Wayback Machine for Research
Short Background
The Wayback Machine can be found at the Internet Archive at https://web.archive.org/. The Internet Archive is a nonprofit organization dedicated to preserving our collective “digital cultural heritage.” Its Wayback Machine captures and preserves versions of websites over time, allowing researchers to revisit online material that has since been altered or removed.
As more of our lives are lived online, archived web content will become increasingly important to genealogists and historians. Personal websites, blogs, social-media pages, organizational websites, online memorials, discussion forums, and other digital records can contain information about relationships, residences, occupations, beliefs, photographs, and important life events that may never appear in a traditional archival collection. Yet digital information is remarkably fragile. A website can disappear when its owner stops paying for hosting, an organization dissolves, a platform closes, or someone simply decides to delete or rewrite its content.
For genealogists, the Wayback Machine therefore functions much like a digital archive of ephemera. Just as earlier generations of researchers examine newspapers, letters, church bulletins, advertisements, and community newsletters, future genealogists may rely on archived websites to reconstruct the lives and communities of people who lived during the early digital age.
The Wayback Machine is particularly valuable when researching organizations or individuals whose online presence changed substantially over time. Rather than relying solely on what a website says today, a researcher can sometimes examine how the site described people, events, relationships, or beliefs at different points in its history. These archived pages can help establish chronology, document changes in language or identity, and preserve information that might otherwise be lost.
However, archived websites should be treated like any other genealogical source. A Wayback Machine capture demonstrates that particular information appeared on a website at approximately a certain time; it does not necessarily prove that the information itself was accurate. The researcher must still evaluate authorship, context, proximity to the event, consistency with other sources, and the possibility that a website was intentionally presenting a particular version of events.
As genealogy becomes increasingly concerned with people whose lives unfolded partly—or even primarily—online, learning how to locate, preserve, cite, and critically evaluate archived web material will become an essential research skill.
Using Wayback Machine, a short how-to with examples
Step 1: Go to https://web.archive.org/
Step 2: Insert website address into the search as seen below:
Step 3: The website will return information pertaining to the number of times that particular page has been captured.
Step 4: Either on the year closest to the timeframe you are looking for on the banner above to populate the date on the Calendar Below. I clicked on 2020.
Step 5: Find the date on the calendar closest to the dates of interest. The blue circles and blue times designate the number of snapshots on a specific date. You can roll over a date to get an idea of the time and number of snapshots for that day. The green circles show how many times the web crawler was redirected. You can click on any of the timestamps of interest. I clicked on 16 November 2020 at 05:35:08.
Step 7: There will be a border at the top of the page that allows you to go back a day, forward a day, or scroll over a specific date within the year. You can also click on any of the links.
Step 8: I clicked on the link "About Mom" from the Love Has Won website and was taken to a capture of that site on 4 December 2020.
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