An Archiving Success on the Wayback Machine

Image: Wikipedia, in the Public Domain.

Hurrah! I have accomplished a goal!

I've been thinking about places where I can share my Leaves on the Tree posts that document my research and family stories. I want my writing to still be available for family, friends, and fellow researchers who might want to learn more about our ancestors once I'm gone.

One place I can leave my writing is on the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine. The Internet Archive is a nonprofit digital library of millions of free texts, movies, software, music, website, and more. The Wayback Machine is the Internet Archive's feature that allows people to visit archived versions of websites. Visitors can type in a URL, select a date range, and surf archived versions of the website.

Last month, I decided to archive all Leaves on the Tree blog posts to the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine. And this week, I finally finished that task. So, I now have an archive of 300+ blog posts that will be available to anyone searching for them. Visitors can also go directly to an archive collection, which is what I created under my Internet Archive account. 

The quickest and easiest way to visit my archive is via this URL: https://archive.org/details/@ncasey61/web-archive. You will see a list of my blog post URLs. The page is best viewed in either the second or third layout option highlighted in pink below:

Main page on the Leaves on the Tree archive.

Unfortunately, it's not possible at present to change the URL to the post title, so in these layouts you will be able to see the title of the post included in the URL. (I asked the Internet Archive folks about this, and they agreed being able to change it would be a good idea!)

The post title is included in the URL.

From the list, click any URL to view a screen capture. Due to my website layout, the actual captured post is a short scroll down the page.

 

A screen capture of one of my posts on the Wayback Machine.

How to Archive a URL

Saving a URL to the Wayback Machine is pretty straightforward:

1. From the Internet Archive home page, click on the Web tab in the menu bar.
2. Copy your post URL and paste it into the "Save Page Now" box at the right.
3. In the dialogue box, choose the features you wish to use. I checked the "Save also to my web archive" and "Email me the results" before clicking "Save Page." (For an explanation of each of the save options, view the video on the Using the Wayback Machine page, particularly from minute 16:04.)
4. Click "Save Page." Once the page is done archiving, you will see a green "Done" button.

It's important to note that this feature only archives a single webpage at a time. It does not archive an entire website. 

Whew! This was a huge task. I approached it in bite-sized chunks, archiving 10 or so posts per session. It took me a bit over a month to finish. 

As I seek to leave my research and writing for others to find in the future, archiving blog posts to the Wayback Machine is one piece in the posterity puzzle.

Until next time...

© Nancy Gilbride Casey, 2026. All rights reserved.

NOTE: You may have seen some recent headlines about the Wayback Machine, such as this one from Wired.com, "The Internet's Most Powerful Archiving Tool is in Peril." The article refers to the Internet Archive Wayback Machine's web crawling to capture content from news organizations' websites before the content disappears. This feature is currently being blocked by several major news outlets, to the detriment of researchers and others who rely on the ability to look at content over time on the Wayback Machine. This does not impact my (or your) ability to archive your blog or other web content to the Wayback Machine.