About that transient web
It’s a resource The Legal Genealogist has consulted dozens of times.
Put together by a researcher named George Baumbach, it’s entitled Colonial Pettypool-Poole-P’Pool Families, and it sets out a vast array of known information — some of it nicely documented, at least with secondary sources — about my own branches of the Pettypool family.
The introductory page begins:
Recent information uncovered from Granville County, North Carolina estate settlements documented that the parents of Elizabeth Pettypool Jones of Rutherford County, North Carolina, wife of John Jones, were John and Sarah Pettypool of Granville County, North Carolina.1
Bliss.
Guess who my fifth great grandmother was? Yep. Elizabeth Pettypool Jones of Rutherford County, North Carolina, wife of John Jones.
So, since my database reflects that John and Elizabeth (Pettypool) Jones were married 21 July 1771 — making that event a great candidate for a Saturday family blog post — and since the database reflects that the Baumbach website was my source for that some 17 years ago, I figured I’d check to see the source of that source and see if I could nail down just where that information came from.
And promptly hit the bump in the road.
That fabulous Baumbach website about Colonial Pettypool-Poole-P’Pool Families?
It’s been offline for years.
The last update noted on the index page was in 2012,2 though at least one individual page has a later “updated” notation.3
Huge amounts of research and data no longer accessible at the Mindspring.com website where it originated.
Now… this isn’t a total loss. Thanks to the Wayback Machine, a feature of the Internet Archive, the vast majority of the Colonial Pettypool-Poole-P’Pool Families website is still accessible.4
Not all of it, mind you. One key page noted on the entry page, a section entitled “Pettypool Ancestors from Great Warley and Barking, Essex County, from London, and from Stepney, Middlesex County, England,” updated in October of 2012, isn’t retrievable at all.5
That too isn’t a total loss, thanks to the fabulous work of the late Carolyn Hart sough, a fellow Pettypool descendant, and carried on by James Furman Poole, another descendant, that English research is fully documented at the website The Pettypool Family: a One-name Study.6
So… what are the lessons learned here?
First and foremost, any website can disappear overnight. Nothing but nothing online today is guaranteed to be online forever. And much content that was created and published only online has already been lost, permanently. So lesson #1 is to make sure that any website we hope to access in the future is captured by the Wayback Machine on Internet Archive, in full. There’s a “Save Page Now” link on the Wayback Machine entry page that lets us help create that archive of pages that were once — way back in time (like last week in internet parlance) — available online.
Second, and a corollary to the first, there isn’t even a guarantee that an archived copy will be available forever. It’d be foolish to think that even the Wayback Machine on Internet Archive will be around forever. So lesson #2 is to ensure that we’ve personally captured all of the information from any website we consider essential. Our working notes and research files ought never to depend on easy access to a website that may just not be there when we need it.
And third, and most importantly, we need to research the sources of our online sources. At a minimum, we need to include in our database citations the source of any online source so we can get to that underlying source if the website goes belly-up. But, even better, we can try to get right to the source of our online source in the first place and cite that instead of the online source.
Or — sigh — discover that there is no known source for our online source.
The Wayback version of the Baumbach website does say that John and Elizabeth (Pettypool) Jones were married 21 July 1771 in Rutherford County, North Carolina.7
And there’s no source cited for that fact at all.
Sigh…
Back to the drawing board.
With lessons learned.
Cite/link to this post: Judy G. Russell, “Lessons learned…,” The Legal Genealogist (https://www.legalgenealogist.com/blog : posted 25 July 2020).
SOURCES
- “Introduction,” Colonial Pettypool-Poole-P’Pool Families (http://www.mindspring.com/~baumbach/ppoole/ : accessed 7 June 2003). ↩
- Ibid., “Index to Biographies And Documents .” ↩
- Ibid., “Pettypool Immigrants to America (William (1)).” Note that square brackets in these titles have been converted to parentheses to avoid a conflict with the footnote plug-in I use for this blog. ↩
- See Colonial Pettypool-Poole-P’Pool Families, captured 17 June 2016 by the Wayback Machine (https://archive.org/web/ : accessed 25 July 2020). ↩
- A search for that page at the Wayback Machine returns the sad statement: “The Wayback Machine has not archived that URL.” ↩
- See Carolyn Hart sough, “The Pettypool Family in England” The Pettypool Family: a One-name Study (https://www.pettypool.com/ : accessed 25 July 2020). ↩
- “John Pettypool(4) (of William(1) , William(2) , Seth(3) ) (born 1725) married c1748 Sarah ?Sanford,” Colonial Pettypool-Poole-P’Pool Families. ↩
These are hard lessons to learn. This is why I am now considering publishing family books and sending them to appropriate libraries. Even if the information needs to be updated, SOMETHING will still be found.
Even if we simply print out a decent typewritten version and get it into the vertical files at the libraries in the areas where our families lived, it will be a start to a permanent record!
Aargh, I say as the wife of a Pettypool descendant who has tried for years to keep this complicated family sorted out in her mind (and on paper). I keep thinking I’ve finally got it until I backslide into confusion.
Tell me about it… William son of William son of William, and Seth son of Seth son of Seth, or is that Seth son of William son of Seth, or…??? And once we get into the Joneses… oh my…
I so feel your pain…I have learned to download EVERYTHING I find after seeing databases disappear from FS, ANC, and FMP…and seeing websites disappear as well. It’s a brutal reality of the mutable nature of everything we see online. The digital world has many advantages, but its biggest disadvantage is its very impermanence.
If one has a website now, is there a way to ensure that Wayback captures its content?
Yes — but you have to choose between easy and free. Free is the Save Page Now option on the Wayback Machine home page (and there’s a Chrome extension you can use when you’re on a website), and it’s a page by page system. Easy is the Archive-It subscription which — I suspect, since there’s no pricing anywhere on the website — is likely to be beyond most individual budgets. You can read more about all these options at the Wayback FAQ.
So true — it’s why I make sure to save records if there is anything worthwhile I’ve extracted. Not only can websites disappear, but as someone else has mentioned, even sets of records can disappear from the large genealogy databases (maybe the contract was only for a few years of sharing that data, for instance). Of course that means I’m quickly filling up my storage. But, that’s cheap. Along with saving records – having multiple backups is also key (both cloud and physical storage). I know – preaching to the choir here.
As an example, I had enjoyed using a family sharing website for quite awhile, and that went kaput. But, thankfully, I’d carefully saved all the postings, so I have all the things my family said about family history stories. Precious indeed. And nothing like seeing the back and forth among senior siblings about whose clarinet it was that my grandfather sold way back when. Makes me smile every time I think about it. And I will take anything for a smile these days.
I do love my digital files, but I make a paper copy of all important documents. Despite what some think, paper is NOT dead, which is a lesson I learned the hard way… hence the box of 5.25″ floppy disks, 3.5″ diskettes, and Zip disks in my garage. :-/
Your blog has helped me so many times! For the past two years I’ve helped my husband’s Jones YDNA group with research assistance. We have several men who tested into this group who are direct descendants of your John Jones. There are a couple of members who have spent their lives researching his Jones line and I learned from them that John Jones’ father was John Jones Sr, and John Sr. was one of 5 brothers (the other 4 brothers were Robert, Richard, James, and Ambrose). That info comes from Robert Jones’ 21 Jan 1771 will in St. James Parish, Mecklenburg Co VA (probated 8 Apr 1771). A few months ago, I came across a Granville Co NC Chancery Court case in 1839 that named all of Ambrose Jones’ descendants. I knew I had a valuable resource with George Baumbach’s Pettypool(e) research and I was so excited to finally figure out how the other Joneses (other than John Jones Jr.) connected with the Pettypool’s. This is not an exaggeration-the day after I came across this Ambrose Jones case, George Baumbach’s website didn’t exist anymore. I was looking at it the day before and everything was fine. So I am very thankful to you for this post! It’s not the first time you’ve saved me and I know it won’t be the last! I’ve learned my lesson and have spent the evening saving and printing his valuable research.