Rootsweb’s Disappearance Got You Down?

​Slim pickings in the genealogy world these days for some great records.  Many genealogical societies have used Rootsweb to host record sets and indexes to records.  Today I found myself looking for some Sonoma County indexes published by Sonoma County Genealogical Society and I got the dreaded:

Ugh.

But never fear, there’s a workaround!  Try the Wayback Machine on the Internet Archive (https://archive.org/).  When your search leads you to the dreaded Rootsweb-is-currently-unavailable message, just copy and paste that url into the Wayback Machine search box on archive.org.  You’ll find a calendar of dates that url was cached.   Click on one of those dates and you’ll be off and running.

As an example I was looking for the Sonoma County Genealogical Society’s “Index to the 1890 Census Sonoma County, California (Reconstructed).”  This is an index to a book published in 1995.  The index hasn’t changed, so I don’t need a brand spanking new webpage showing it – a webpage cached in 2016 will do me just fine.  And even though Rootsweb was down, I was still able to find just what I needed.  Thank you, Internet Archive!

When Rootsweb’s got you down, try the Internet Archive.  You’ll be happy you did.

Apologies for my own disappearance from my blog these past few months.  Some travel led into some family commitments led into the holidays led into some accounting responsibilities...yada yada yada.  I'll try to be more present..  - Mary