Follow Friday - Surfing route to my own lost page

Ok this is my first attempt at Follow Friday and is a bit mad but go with me, I want to tell how I found my long lost geocities family tree page totally by accident today.

• At the start of this week I joined GeneaBloggers and their Facebook Genea-Bloggers group.

• While searching Facebook for that group today, I found an 'interest' page just Genealogy.

• At the bottom of that was a list of 'Related global posts' and one by a Steve Hayes caught my attention about 'Lost Genealogy web pages -- and how to find them'

• That took me to his blog and todays entry about it being a year since Yahoo closed down Geocities and how all that information may not be lost after all.

• He goes on to mention a site called Reocities which manged to salvage quite a lot.

• On the Reocities home page it explains they have saved millions of pages and to find them just change the address on any of your old links from geocities to reocities.

• So I open a fresh tab and type in www.reocities.com/jantyannie and up comes my first ever family tree web pages.

I had tried to back up the pages from Yahoo before they shut down the site but could never find a way to reopen the files or access the information in them so I love the fact that someone else thought all that information was worth keeping too.

As family historians and genealogists we love finding things our ancestors chose to keep and lament the things they didn't or were unable to keep. As we move to ever more digital information someone else gets to choose what will be kept. Maybe we should think about how our descendants will find our information in the future if its only ever digital.

If you had a geocities account its well worth checking out Reocities and the Making of page is great reading.