For a few years now, I’ve noticed that a helpful website on spies from the two world wars has been offline. Stephen Stratford’s site had a wealth of information on a variety of topics having to do with British Military and Criminal History. I was most interested in the spy information but I’ve seen links to Stephen’s site on other pages that deal with executed criminals.
It used to be that Stephen’s site was one of the first search results to appear when one typed in the names of various spies, e.g. Josef Jakobs. Alas, a few years ago, I noticed that it was becoming harder and harder to find Stephen’s site. But then it wasn’t showing up in the search results at all, although one could still access it if one had the website address. But now… now it seems that the various pages of the site return a message of:
Not Found
The requested URL was not found on this server.
Apache/2.4.29 (Ubuntu) Server at www.stephen-stratford.co.uk Port 443
This is, obviously, most annoying. But, if one types in the home address for Stephen’s site… it does still exist – www.stephen-stratford.co.uk – except now it is the site of a locksmith business. This might be Stephen’s day job. I haven’t reached out to him to see if it is still him or if someone else snapped up the website address when the registration lapsed.
There was so much useful information on his site… and it seems such a shame to lose it all. But… as it turns out, all is not lost. Thanks to the Wayback Machine, the archive of the internet, one can still find Stephen’s site at various snapshots in time.
The locksmith site seems to have gone live in 2018, and the last useful snapshot of the original site comes from January 2017. If one searches on the Wayback Machine, you can still find the original home page. So far, all of the other pages that I have clicked on have worked. I did notice that while photo captions survive in the index, the actual photos are not there. At least, not all of them.
It’s nice to know that the information is still there, at least in some form, albeit slightly more difficult to find and access. I thought that perhaps most of this information would now be available on Wikipedia but, nope.
Only Carl Hans Lody has a Wikipedia page, so the information on the WWI spies from Stephen’s site was beyond helpful. I’m thinking that I may add some information on the WWI spies to my own site. As I transition to one integrated blog/website on WordPress, I want to maximize the usage that the site may get.
I also realize that I likely need to go through my blog and website and either remove or update the links to Stephen’s site.