My granddad's 1973 photo album had a link scribbled on the back - took me 6 months to realize the whole site was gone

I was going through boxes after he passed and found this old album from when he was in the Navy. On the back of one picture he wrote 'see the full story at navypals73.com' in pencil. Tried typing it in and got nothing. No cache. No Wayback Machine copy. Just a dead domain. My cousin said 'why even bother it's just photos' but that hit me different. He took the time to write that url. There had to be something there. Anyone else ever find a personal link from a relative that led to a complete void? How do you even start looking for something that specific?

2 comments

2 Comments

umamoore3d ago

Six months? Man, that's a lot of time to spend on a dead link from the 70s. I found a similar thing in my uncle's stuff once, a phone number for a "Captain's Club" scribbled on a napkin from 1985. I dialed it once, got a fax machine, and that was that. Not everything has some deep hidden meaning, sometimes old people just write stuff down and forget about it. Honestly, you probably saved yourself a headache if the site was anything like my uncle's collection of blurry dock photos.

oliver2422d ago

yeah no you're probably right honestly. i spent like 3 hours once trying to trace a weird symbol my granddad drew in his old fishing logbook. turned out it was just his shorthand for "caught a boot." not a clue, not a secret society, just a boot. i think we all wanna believe there's some cool mystery hidden in the junk we find, but more often than not it's just a misdial and a blurry photo of a dock. makes me wonder what future generations are gonna find in our cloud storage. "what was this guy thinking with all these screenshots of tacos?