Using the Wayback Machine to Find Old Websites

 There is a very handy website called the Wayback Machine that you can use to find websites that are no longer available.  Basically the Wayback Machine makes a copy of the website as it appears on certain dates. If you know that XYX website had something last June, you can put the URL in the Wayback Machine and it will return a figure like this

followed by a calendar.  The figure above shows how many times that website was changed in each month of that year.  If you click on the year, there is a calendar under that figure that shows now many times the Wayback machine snapshotted that website that day.

The figure above is the one I got by searching for Girl Scouts River Valleys.  GSRV used to have a set of meeting plans that were very popular among leaders, but they are not there any more.  I don't know exactly when they were taken down but I know they were available in 2020, and I remember that they had been moved to a volunteer site, so I searched for https://www.girlscoutsrv.org/ .  Then I clicked on one of the dates which took me to an archived copy of GSRV's website as it was on that date.  From there I looked for the volunteer website and clicked it.  I navigated to this site, where you can click and get to the plans for your level. 

One thing I will say is that you have to be patient, the website runs pretty slowly and for the GSRV plans, when I tried to pull them up, it gave me error messages and redirected me but when I was patient, I got them. 

Here are some other plan collections that have been taken down: 

Girl Scouts Greater Chicago

GSUSA

This doesn't work for everything--several councils had plans that were on drop-down menus and the Wayback machine didn't pick up the things on the drop-downs, just the headings.