I have only just heard of Ray's death. He was my sixth cousin and it was only through John Hanson's research and the work Ray did to put it on the web that I found a branch of my family going back to the 17th century. My belated condolences to his family and friends.
Regarding the website, I raised a support call with the hosting company, PlusNet, and below is part of the reply I got. In summary, it looks as though the website was removed when PlusNet discontinued their FrontPage service. They went on to mention what we have already discovered, that some of the content is on the Web Archive (Wayback Machine). Unfortunately the Foskew branch (my line) is not present.
"Dear Mr Robinson,
Thank you for your query. Unfortunately for data protection reasons we are not able to disclose why the site may have been removed or moved on by the site owner. However if the owner of the site is now deceased this may have been removed when we discontinued the frontpage service.
If this is the case the next of kin for the customer would need to contact us to request if we still have a copy of this and to discuss the best way of putting this back.
If you are interested in taking over the site then you may wish to discuss with the next of kin migrating the domain to yourself and this is still hosted and registered by us as indicated on the public whois record for the domain.
http://webwhois.nic.uk/cgi-bin/whois.cgi?query=cosford-database.co.uk&WHOIS+Submit.x=52&WHOIS+Submit.y=4"
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