Using The Internet Archive

You may have seen references to The Internet Archive on some of my pages.

Some pages from my local/parishcouncil server:

• The Complete Peerage and George Edward Cokayne (published between 1887 and 1898)
• Plantagenet Ancestry by Douglas Richardson
• Douglas Richardson author of Plantagenet Ancestry (2011), Magna Carta Ancestry (2011) and Royal Ancestry (2013).

My use of the Internet Archive started when I was looking at past "snapshots" of my own and other websites. I have now found that you can access documents and books that you can "borrow". An instance of this is the Plantagenet Ancestry by Douglas Richardson

A link to the Internet Archive

Plantagenet Ancestry - Douglas Richardson https://archive.org/details/plantagenetances0000rich/mode/2up

This where I downloaded the source text for the notion that Sir John de Botetourt was not the bastard son of Edward I.

Finding things on the Internet Archive

While there is a search function on the Internet Archive site you pretty much need to know it is there before you try to make a search. Many of the items contain that you are looking for and I don't think that the archive is indexed by the search engines.

For example, the Douglas Richardson book was found as Douglas had placed a link to it on his website. Many of the links to defunct websites, such as mau

The use of Wikitree

The Wikitree website is probably the best resource to find Internet Archive links. Unlike many other geneological websites, apart from it being free, there is an intelligent interchange of information between its users. Notes are available on many of the profiles and you can read these without have to pay for a subscription.

Copying things from the Internet Archive

This can be problematic!

Many of the historical manuscripts are image files of the original and are scanned at different levels. Some are just image files and some are actually OCRd and you can copy and paste from them.

There are also others that have additional DRM added to them.

tempusfugit on the Internet Archive

The April 2024 article on The Medium.com reminded me of having looked at my own efforts over the last 20 years.

Some of my earlier efforts are pretty poor. Some are not responsive and many are purely textual. A lot has happened to the Internet since I started out. An example can be seen from 2004 on the link preceeding this text.