The Genealogy & Family History Social Network
Rocky and Bullwinkle to the Rescue
Sigh. Lazing the day away watching Saturday morning cartoons is one of my favorite childhood memories... the most anticipated being the Rocky and Bullwinkle Show. There wasn't a segment of that show I didn't like, but my favorites were the Fractured Fairy Tales and Mr. Peabody's Improbable History.
So what do Saturday morning cartoons (and the Rocky and Bullwinkle Show in particular) have to do with family history and genealogy in general? Aside from triggering my own memories, some of which having little to do with the cartoons themselves, the Rocky and Bullwinkle Show in the guise of Mr. Peabody's Improbable History apparently made an indelible mark on someone (or several someones) of tremendous importance to historical preservation.
Recall Mr. Peabody was a dog with a pet boy named Sherman. The two would travel back through time in Mr. Peabody's WABAC machine to witness the real historical events and correct things so that history would be accurate.
Fast forward to 1996. The place? San Francisco. A 501(c)(3) non-profit was founded to construct an internet library and preserve digital collections and web pages. It now preserves texts, "moving images," and audio in addition to web pages. The name of this organization is the Internet Archive. To do a deep search of their archives, it is helpful to know some Unix programming, but the lay person may search their archives by typing a URL into their search engine, dubbed the "Wayback Machine" after Mr. Peabody's time machine.
The Wayback Machine and the Internet Archives themselves have proven a useful tool in my own genealogical research. Using the Wayback Machine for example, I have been able to revisit websites with important genealogical information that have long since disappeared from the interwebs. You can also access things like books, moving images (including home movies), and even software from the tabs at the top of the Internet Archive web page. There is even a K-12 project the Internet Archives calls the "K-12 Web Archiving Program" to get children in the classroom involved in preserving what they see as important on the WWW today.
If you've never tried using the Internet Archives and the Wayback Machine, I recommend giving it a shot after the usual round with Google Books.
![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_e.png?x-id=3674cf7e-c716-4a0a-9c08-598bcf053cb7)
So what do Saturday morning cartoons (and the Rocky and Bullwinkle Show in particular) have to do with family history and genealogy in general? Aside from triggering my own memories, some of which having little to do with the cartoons themselves, the Rocky and Bullwinkle Show in the guise of Mr. Peabody's Improbable History apparently made an indelible mark on someone (or several someones) of tremendous importance to historical preservation.
Recall Mr. Peabody was a dog with a pet boy named Sherman. The two would travel back through time in Mr. Peabody's WABAC machine to witness the real historical events and correct things so that history would be accurate.
Fast forward to 1996. The place? San Francisco. A 501(c)(3) non-profit was founded to construct an internet library and preserve digital collections and web pages. It now preserves texts, "moving images," and audio in addition to web pages. The name of this organization is the Internet Archive. To do a deep search of their archives, it is helpful to know some Unix programming, but the lay person may search their archives by typing a URL into their search engine, dubbed the "Wayback Machine" after Mr. Peabody's time machine.
The Wayback Machine and the Internet Archives themselves have proven a useful tool in my own genealogical research. Using the Wayback Machine for example, I have been able to revisit websites with important genealogical information that have long since disappeared from the interwebs. You can also access things like books, moving images (including home movies), and even software from the tabs at the top of the Internet Archive web page. There is even a K-12 project the Internet Archives calls the "K-12 Web Archiving Program" to get children in the classroom involved in preserving what they see as important on the WWW today.
If you've never tried using the Internet Archives and the Wayback Machine, I recommend giving it a shot after the usual round with Google Books.
Views: 41
Comment
-
Comment by Renee Thompson on July 15, 2009 at 10:34am
-
You're welcome, Jeanie. I wrote about it because I, too, tend to forget about the Internet Archives and the Wayback Machine... and yet, there are a lot of wonderful things on that website!
-
Comment by Jeanie DiLeonardo on July 14, 2009 at 3:13pm
-
Very cool - I had heard about this before I started genealogy, and of course forgot about it since I had no practical use for it at the time. Thanks so much for the reminder, Renee (and I LOVED Mr. Peabody & Sherman, and Rocky & Bullwinkle, too!).
© 2024 Created by IIGSExecDirector.
Powered by
You need to be a member of Genealogy Wise to add comments!
Join Genealogy Wise