Many older weather records exist, but because they are stored in ship logs, on paper, or in museum log books, we can’t use them to do modern scientific studies with. If we had access to the data, it would give us a clearer look at long-term weather patterns that we can’t do now. Because of that, there are several citizen science projects online that allow interested private citizens to take on part of the job of digitizing these old records.  You can read about the Ben Nevis project from Dr. Marshall Shepherd of UGA at Forbes.com here. Ben Nevis is the highest mountain in the United Kingdom, and a weather observatory up there collected weather observations as far back as 1883. Those records need to be put into computer databases using scanned paper records.  Scientific American talks about a similar project for old ship data at https://www.scientificamerican.com/citizen-science/old-weather-zooniverse/#. And if neither of these strikes your fancy, Wikipedia has a longer list of citizen science projects at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_citizen_science_projects. If you prefer to do your own weather observations, a great place to start with rainfall is the CoCoRaHS network at https://www.cocorahs.org, or contact me for more information since I am a Georgia regional coordinator.