[pm-h] Marriage License Data

[Robert Stone]

(resending this without images due to mailing list size limit)

Greetings,

tl;dr - While the form likely connected to a database/datastore and there
is no way to retrieve that, the wayback machine archived a lot (but not
all) of the data in another format.

*The Bad News*

So for funsies I took a look at this form and the HTML for it.  Turns out that
the information entered is POST'ed back to the server at yearlastwild.asp
to handle the request.  Just to be absolutely certain, I went ahead and
submitted a request monitoring the network traffic and confirmed the POST
request.  That ASP script was likely connecting to some sort of database to
retrieve and then format the data for presentation.

Just to be SUPER certain there wasn't a whole huge blob of javascript
representing the dataset (which would be incredibly unlikely, but you never
know...) and the largest request is 27.7 KB, and it's for a font.

*The Good News*

Well, then, let's see if the marriage data is presented in any other format
on the site, like a big huge list.  Crazier things have happened...

https://web.archive.org/web/20030208012802/http://vienici.
com:80/abmomarr.html


If we scroll down we can see Washington County and if we select the He- we
can see the same entry for Henry S:

https://web.archive.org/web/20030219131906/http://vienici.
com:80/moabs/xmarrwash/xhe-j.html

Which actually matches the data from yearlastwild.asp (although, only the
name and date are contained here and not the description).

So it seems for washing county there is some data and possibly more from
the Washing County GenWeb.  I do see for other counties there is much more
data, such as Franklin County:
https://web.archive.org/web/20030407195843/http://www.
vienici.com:80/mofran/vB/p201225.html

With some work and a whole bunch of parsing you could recreate a good
chunk!  Of course, I'd probably hunt high and low to see if someone else
had this dataset I could use (or buy) but nice to know at least parts of it
live on.

Hopefully you find the above helpful.

Best Regards,
Robert Stone

On Tue, Jan 16, 2018 at 8:54 PM, Mike Flannigan <mikeflan at att.net> wrote:

>
> This is an archive of a website that went dead in 2011:
> https://web.archive.org/web/20090609191130/http://www.vienic
> i.com:80/moabs/lookups.html
>
> The 3rd search box (link) takes you to:
> https://web.archive.org/web/20090306211924/http://www.vienic
> i.com:80/moabs/yearlastwild.asp
>
> The search does not work on that page, for obvious reasons.  I have looked
> at
> the page source and decided the search was run by javascript, but I could
> be
> wrong about that.  If you are snowed in and have some time to devote to
> this,
> what I want to know is what format was the marriage license data in on this
> guys server.  I don't think that can be told from the page source, but I
> thought
> I would ask you guys.  Perhaps you would need the ASP file to tell that??
> It was not a huge amount of data, so it could have been in almost any
> format.
>
> The reason I am asking is because we are trying to find that data 6 years
> after the guy died.
>
> I'm pretty sure he had an account at the Wayback Machine, and he may have
> stored
> the data there, in addition to other places.
>
>
> Mike
> _______________________________________________
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> Houston at pm.org
> http://mail.pm.org/mailman/listinfo/houston
> Website: http://houston.pm.org/
>
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