Kidwell Family and Kentucky Catholicity

We are happy to bring you the Kidwell family notebook and the history of Catholicity in Kentucky.

Well, these new Kentucky downloads are not new, really.  The source material is old, because we republish old material that is out of print or, as in one case here, never previously published.  It’s old in another sense because we used to offer it on a CD-ROM, back in the days when getting a CD-ROM in the mail was the modern way to get genealogical or historical information.

But as downloads, these two Kentucky items, the Kidwell Family Notebook and Kentucky Catholicity, are indeed new.

Catholic families of Kentucky

First off, there’s some extraordinary genealogy.  We were very fortunate to inherit Stella Mulholland Bogner’s Kidwell family notebook.  The intrepid Mrs. Bogner documented this large family from its origins in St. Mary’s County, Maryland and its migration to Kentucky as part of the Roman Catholic diaspora that followed the Revolutionary War.  It’s first publication ever was on our discontinued CD-ROM, but continued requests made it essential that we make it available as a download.  We’ve indexed it, and added a collection of Kidwells who appear in the 1850 US Census of Kentucky.

CLICK HERE to go to the page on our main website about the Kidwell family notebook.

Secondly, there’s the Hon. Ben. J. Webb’s “The Centenary of Catholicity in Kentucky” [1884].

We’re not overstating the case when we say that this book is essential to understanding the migration of Maryland (and Virginia) Catholics to Kentucky in the years following the Revolutionary War, and in understanding the foundations of Roman Catholicism in Kentucky and the rest of the Midwest.

The copy of Catholicity in Kentucky that we scanned to produce this project is unique:  it was owned by one I. A. Spalding — and we assume that the owner’s name was Ignatius A. Spalding.  The footnote on page 109 of the book mentions three descendants of Benedict Spalding with this name.  These were the Ignatius A. Spalding who married Ann Pottinger, and his son and grandson.  One of these men — and we are not likely to ever know which one — annotated this particular copy of Catholicity in Kentucky, making a number of corrections and additions in names and places.  All his annotations are legible in the scanned copy.

You can find this one available for free download elsewhere on the web, but we think that if you’re serious about this topic we’ve got some compelling reasons why you’ll want our download.

CLICK HERE to go to the page on our main website about Catholicity in Kentucky.
From the History of Catholicity in Kentucky
Bishop Flaget

 

So, we invite you to learn more about the Kidwell Family and Kentucky Catholicity by going to this page about both.

 

 

CD Closeout

About CDs…

Back in August we made the momentous “CD closeout” decision — that we would discontinue selling our historical and genealogical CD-ROMs, and gradually migrate the contents of our CDs to downloads.

Well, it’s been happening!  We’ve eliminated around a dozen of our CDs as the inventory sold out, and we’re making progress migrating their contents to download format.

There have been three positive results of the CD closeout so far:

–A number of smaller, less significant publications that were once lurking on CDs with little publicity are now available as individual downloads — with their own catalog entries.   People can actually find them!  Eventually they may even show up on Google!

–We’ve saved time and money.  When you deal with physical inventory — creating the CDs, reproducing them, maintaining the inventory, and shipping them — you spend more time, effort, and money than one would think.  The net result is that we have more time to spend finding more historical and genealogical material and making it available to you.

–Our customers have saved time, money, and helped avoid clutter.  Saved money?  Yes!  When we discontinued our Canaan, CT CD ($20) we replaced it with three downloads.  If you bought all three, you would barely spend half that.  And we doubt many people will buy all three.  The clutter speaks for itself — we never devised a perfect way for storing CDs of our own so we could find things when we needed them, and it’s easy to store downloads on your hard drive.  And time:  we figure that it costs us two or three minutes each time we need to put a CD in and wait for it to crank up, and then to go through it to find what we want, and we suspect it was wasting your time too.  Furthermore, downloads arrive instantaneously.  CDs come by postal mail.  Enough said about that!

But still

We do have some CDs left in inventory.  We’ll continue to sell them until they’re gone.  Here’s what left:

Child’s Gazetteer of Sullivan County, NY

Erie County (NY) Directory

Blue Book of Newton, MA

Child’s Gazetteer of Lewis County, NY

Child’s Gazetteer of Wayne County, NY

Nevada, Missouri Directory

Worcester, MA Directory

Catholic Families of Kentucky

If one of these matches your research interests, we do advise you to act now.  Once the CDs are gone, the material on them goes into the queue awaiting republication as downloads.  There, they vie for priority with the new material we’re working our way through, so it could be a year or more before material on a discontinued CD is again available.  A word to the wise should be sufficient!

As always, thanks to our faithful customers.  It’s you whom we do this for, and even as the CD closeout continues, it’s your needs we try to satisfy.  We try never to forget that.

Recovering history
Between the Lakes Group helps you recover history!
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