As genealogists, we frequently reference the deaths of ancestors. This is different kind of death, however:

GeoCities seems to be on its last breaths:

Current GeoCities customers:

I don’t have a site at GeoCities, so why do I care if they are shutting down their free accounts?

A distant cousin has a GeoCities site that contains oodles of McBurnett data. True, very little of this info has online sources or documentation. But, of what I have gotten from this site, I have been able to document almost all of it through Ancestry, Footnote, Family Search, etc. And my sources support her data at her GeoCities site. (I like to do things backwards )

You do not need to know any user names or passwords to copy publicly-available web sites. In fact, you can even copy web sites that you do not own…

I clicked on his link for Windows users, and in that post he recommends an open-source (free!) program called HTTrack Website Copier. Ok, Dick knows what he’s talking about, so I’ll give it a try.

I downloaded the first version listed, WinHTTrack : Windows 95/98/NT/2K/XP (also included: command line version).

That took maybe two minutes to download with my DSL connection. Then I installed the program, another minute maybe. I ran the program as is with its default settings, entered the address of my cousin’s site and pressed <next>, then <finish>.

I sat back and watched for a few seconds as the program began to download the website’s files. I expected this to take quite some time, so I started playing with my cellphone as I waited. After about 2 minutes, the program made a wierd noise and announced that the mirroring operation was completed!

I clicked on <Browse Mirrored Website>….

…and there on my hard drive, in a folder that I had created in my McBurnett surname folder, was her entire Geocities site, snug as a bug! All of the links worked (she used GedHTree to display her gedcom as html), all the data was there, everything.

I am thrilled, let me tell you. And this just might be the simplest “geeky” thing that I’ve ever done. My cat could have done it, I swear! Her entire site added up to only 10 MB on my hard drive.

So folks, if you have a GeoCities site of your own, or use someone else’s site in your research, don’t wait to take action. It would truly be a tragedy to lose all of these sites and all of their wonderful genealogical data!