Rowland Family of Newport, Ohio

(and retrieving lost information with the WayBack Machine)

The Rowland family were among the early settlers of Newport Township, Washington County, Ohio. Arriving in 1805, just two years after Ohio became a state, John Rowland (1761-1850) and his descendants became prominent citizens of Newport Township. The image at the top of this article shows land ownership in Newport Township as of 1858. The light blue shading identifies lands owned by members of the Rowland family and are estimated to be in excess of 2,200 acres. Their lands were concentrated along the Ohio River and followed Newell Run (creek) to the north and Northup Run toward the northwest. This Rowland family line is part of Rowland DNA Group B.

The History of Newport Ohio, from a genealogical perspective, was well-documented on the NewportOhioHistory.com website. However, that website ceased to exist 2018, and all of the genealogical source links to it used on WikiTree and other tree-building sites went cold. All link clicks returned a 404 error, which is the internet code for an invalid web address or a website that no longer exists. Unfortunately, many of the WikiTree profiles of John Rowland’s descendants used that website as an additional source, and visitors could no longer see that source for themselves.

I thought the information might have been lost forever, but there is an application called the WayBack Machine at the Internet Archive that can search the more than 702 web pages it has saved and indexed. Fortunately, I knew the Rowland family information was originally housed on subpage 267 of the old NewportOhioHistory website. Plugging that information into the WayBack Machine, I was able to find four different copies (captures) of the Rowland Family page. The first (2009) and second (2014) copies were early versions that did not contain any Rowland information. The fourth copy (2019) appears to be after someone deleted the website contents. Luckily, the third copy (2017) contained the missing information.

I downloaded the entire contents of the February 02, 2017 copy from the WayBack Machine. Next, I created a cover page and added an explanation page of how this information was retrieved. Everything was then combined into a pdf added to the document download area of our website. You can see it (and download) the new document here: