This is one of those programs that I have been using since as far back as I can remember. This program will let you copy an entire website for browsing offline later on. Please read the following description from their website and then read my suggestion on how to use this program in your Genealogy research.
“HTTrack is a free (GPL, libre/free software) and easy-to-use offline browser utility. It allows you to download a World Wide Web site from the Internet to a local directory, building recursively all directories, getting HTML, images, and other files from the server to your computer. HTTrack arranges the original site’s relative link-structure. Simply open a page of the “mirrored” website in your browser, and you can browse the site from link to link, as if you were viewing it online. HTTrack can also update an existing mirrored site, and resume interrupted downloads. HTTrack is fully configurable, and has an integrated help system.” – www.httrack.com
Now that you know exactly what HTTrack is let me tell you how I use it on my Genealogy research and maybe you all can use it the same way. While doing my research I have come across websites that are full databases and the ancestors mentioned there are too many to copy, print, or annotate. What I do instead is download the entire website using this program and place the entire thing on my sources folder.
Then when I am away from home and have no connection to the internet I can continue doing my research on that particular website. Where it comes super handy is when the website you are looking for no longer exists. This has happened twice but luckily I had made copies of them and I still continue to cite them. Hope that you all find this program useful.
Please note this only works on websites that have .html extension and will not work on wordpress websites.
To download go to:Â http://www.httrack.com/
That’s a great tip. I’m curious – – how large are the files (or the entire folder) when you download the site?
Thanks Lisa for your comment. To put it into context I’ll give the size of two of my favorite websites: The First one contains over 11,000 names with full bibliography but not that many images and it is 14.3 megabytes, and the Second, which contains a lot of pictures is 137 megabytes big. I try to download websites that are heavy on text and provide sources to find the original documents. Hope you try this program out.