Worcester MA Directory for 1871

We’re very happy to announce the republication of Howland’s Directory of Worcester, MA for 1871, this time as a download.

A few years ago we made this rarity available on CD-ROM, but when we discontinued our line of CDs, it became — as far as we know — unavailable except as a rare book.  Now we are catching up on making material that was previously on our CDs available as downloads, and today Howland’s Worcester MA Directory for 1871 came up.

We are aware that Ancestry.com does offer lookups in this directory, but we are unaware of any other online sources for this 405 page volume.  While lookups are certainly useful, we think that having the “real thing” at hand offers many advantages that you don’t get with a download.

At any rate, you can read more about this volume, and, if you feel inclined, you can buy it via download if you go to our page about the Worcester MA Directory for 1871.

Worcester MA Directory for 1871

Wayne County NY material

We are very happy to announce that we’ve made two items of Wayne County, NY material again available.

Previously included on our CD-ROM (since discontinued) were Child’s Gazetteer of Wayne County, NY as well as a collection of Wayne County material from the New York State Board of Charities three-volume 1906 annual report.  We are delighted that both are now available as downloads, and — even better — at a significant savings to you.

Please CLICK HERE to go to a page all about the Gazetteer (a must for genealogists and local historians).

Please CLICK HERE to go to our main Wayne County, NY page for more about the charities of Wayne County.

We would be remiss, of course, if we also didn’t offer a link to our catalog.  Have a look!  You never know what you might find!

Wayne County NY material
Just one page from the Gazetteer. Look closely. They offer a course in “Phonography” which is presumably all about how to operate one of those new-fangled things called a “phonograph”.

PHOIS yearbook from Poughkeepsie High School for 1934

We’re delighted to bring you the PHOIS yearbook from Poughkeepsie High School for 1934!  This New York State high school was very dependable in titling their yearbooks:  “Phois” it was — and this was volume 26 of the series!

We were interested in two particular items about this yearbook — and we’ve seen a whole lot of yearbooks over the years (our “Yearbooks” page on our main website will give testimony to that!)  — first of all, the editors produced nice pen and ink drawings of what Poughkeepsie might have looked like in the past, and also what they felt it might look like in the future.  Can we simply say that their estimate of what Poughkeepsie might look like in the future was a tad optimistic?

The other was resolution of a question that had been on our minds for a long time:  during the Great Depression, did ordinary people realize that they were involved in something other than a minor business cycle fluctuation?  This yearbook answered that question for us.  In an ad for a secretarial school in the PHOIS yearbook from Poughkeepsie High School for 1934 appeared a line noting that this school was successful in placing graduates in good jobs “even in this depression.”  So the answer to our question is “yes”.

We also wanted to note that this was the first project our new intern, Gabby Gladding, was involved in.  She did a very capable job on the scanner, and, proving both that she’s a talented intern but also that she brings something else to the game, she identified and solved a problem we had been having with a strong outside light source affecting the scan quality.

If you’d like to consider buying the download of the PHOIS yearbook from Poughkeepsie High School for 1934, please CLICK HERE to go to the Dutchess County, NY page of our website.

PHOIS yearbook from Poughkeepsie High School for 1934

 

 

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.

 

 

Genesee County Gazetteer for 1882

We are very happy to report that the Genesee County Gazetteer for 1882 is once again available.

This item, originally published by A. J. Craft, is 455 pages long, and most of it is of interest to someone researching in Genesee County, New York, today.  While roughly 140 pages of this directory are dedicated to the legal practices and customs in business in those days — which can be useful background information — it applies generally and isn’t specific to Genesee County.  It also includes a lengthy article on James G. Garfield, the President who was assassinated in 1881 — which the text calls “…the saddest history of the American Nation”) — which is of more general interest.

The remainder (and by far the largest part of the volume) is of great interest to genealogists and historians today.  Included are histories, including names of early settlers, of Genesee County (and of the Holland Patent) and its constituent towns, Genesee County business by type, and perhaps most important, a directory of individuals and businesses in the county, arranged by town.
The Post Office, occupation, and number of acres for farmers, are included.  This directory section is 230 pages long. 

There is also a decent amount of advertising.  These items were heavily used in businesses and were rarely retained, so this is pretty much a rarity. 

It was formerly included in our Genesee County Collection CD-ROM, which has been discontinued.

More information about the Genesee County Gazetteer for 1882 on our Genesee County page.

 

Sesquicentennial of Genesee County

We are very pleased to be able to again offer the Sesquicentennial of Genesee County, NY — 1802 -1952 — this time as a download.  It had previously been included (some would say “submerged) in our Genesee County Collection CD-ROM.  Since we’ve discontinued that CD, this book now gets to stand on its own, and, perhaps, to get the attention it deserves.

This is a nicely done sesquicentennial book; there’s no question about that.  The County clearly organized thoroughly for the celebration, and committees were devised to deal with all the various aspects of such a multi-day event.  The book has a number of historical articles that are uniformly well-written and appear to be consistent with what we know of the history of the area.  The list of sponsors of the Sesquicentennial runs several pages, and with the listings of the committees, one senses that a fairly high percentage of the 1952 population got their name into this book in one form or another.  The pictures (black and white) are of good quality.  The advertisements — as usual a useful glimpse of the local economy — are numerous and well-produced.

If you have a historical or family interest in Genesee County, you will probably want to have the Sesquicentennial of Genesee County NY to refer to.  You can read more about it (and about our other Genesee County offerings) on the Genesee County page of our main website.

This was previously part of our CD-ROM:

Replacing our CDs

Minisink and Port Jervis replacing our CDs

Replacing our CDs has shown up a benefit we hadn’t really anticipated.

Here’s what happens.  As our customers know, our CDs usually contained more than one item.  However, we tended to title the CD with the name of the most important (our call) item on the CD.

However, when we replace our CDs with downloads, each publication on the CD becomes a product unto itself.  In that way, it gets its own listing in our catalog and on the various geographic and special interest pages of our website.

Here’s an example.  Recently we retired our CD-ROM about the History of the Minisink Region of New York State (and Pennsylvania, and New Jersey).  The featured component of that CD was Stickney’s 1867 History of the Minisink Region.   However, there were two other publications on that CD:  Twin River Valley, the 1834 yearbook of Port Jervis High school, and a particularly scarce 1922 Directory of Port Jervis  (which included neighboring locations).

The CD never sold as well as we thought it would; we suspect the reason was that if people already had access to the Stickney book, they went no further and never discovered the Port Jervis Directory or the Port Jervis High School yearbook on the same CD.

Well, now that we’re reissued the three as individual downloads, we think more people will be seeing these additional publications — that were actually there all along.

Do you want to take a look at any of these?

Here’s how to find them:

Stickney’s History of the Minisink — click HERE

Twin River Valley, the Port Jervis High School yearbook — click HERE

That elusive 1922 Port Jervis Directory — click HERE

Of course, our main catalog is HERE, so why not have a look at it, too?

Bottom line:  we think that replacing our CDs will help you find things you never suspected we had just as much as it helps us streamline our processes and deliver quality content to you faster and more economically.

Quinlan’s History of Sullivan County package

Several years ago, we re-published a real classic,

Sullivan County, New York

Since then, free downloads of that volume have become available.  We we could see that there wasn’t much point of keeping the CD-ROM in our catalog, and that it might be a disservice to our customers to ask them to pay for something that they could have had for free elsewhere.  Hence, we discontinued the CD-ROM.  (If you would like to find a free version — and Quinlan is absolutely THE go-to source on early Sullivan County — here’s a good place to download it for free.)(You’ll find the image quality of the free version isn’t as good as ours, but free is free!)

There is one big problem with Quinlan’s History regardless of what version you use.  It has no index.  Of course, creating indexes was as difficult and time-consuming back when Quinlan wrote his history as it is today (maybe more so — we at least can use a computer in our indexing process), so we cannot fault him for omitting it  However, its absence is a lasting defect.  We decided that we could add value, so we put everything else aside and indexed it ourselves.  If you’d like, you can buy a copy of our index for $2.50 — CLICK HERE to go to our website.

HOWEVER, we didn’t stop there.

We decided that we could even improve on that.

When we used Quinlan, we discovered that it was difficult to correlate what was going on in one township with what was happening in other townships and the larger world outside.  To help deal with this, we prepared a detailed timeline from Quinlan.  We’ve included it, and we hope you find it as useful as we have.

And, sometimes, it’s nice to have some pictures to look at when you’re reading about an area.  While there are very few if any Sullivan County photos available of a time before Quinlan wrote his book (circa 1872) and rather few for the next few years.  So we did throw in a few postcards from the turn of the century, just for fun.  We hope you enjoy them!

So, here’s the package deal:

get (1) the full text of Quinlan (our high resolution scans), with appendix, advertisements, etc., AND (2) our complete index, AND (3) the timeline, AND (4) the pictures, all for $5.00 — and you can download it in PDF format right now!

If you’re interested in Sullivan County, New York, and our Quinlan’s History of Sullivan County package sounds like a reasonably attractive proposition, visit our website and download it!

 

 

New Milford downloads

We’re happy to announce two New Milford downloads!

A few months ago we announced that we had discontinued our “New Milford: 230 Years” CD-ROM.

A 1907 panorama map of New Milford

Now, we’re happy to say that we’ve followed through on our commitment to bring you the important material from that CD in the form of downloadable files.  You benefit because (1) it’s less expensive for us to deliver material to you by downloads than by making and shipping CDs — so we pass the savings along to you, and (2) you get the material you want immediately (or as fast as the file can download) without waiting for us to pack and ship the CD and the Post Office to deliver it to you.

Without further ado, here are the two books that are once again available as downloads:

Two Centuries of New Milford:  1707 – 1907

The New Milford High School yearbook for 1937

Both of these include indexes we prepared especially for them, and both are in PDF format — readable on your computer, whether a PC or Mac.

While the CD-ROM cost $20 plus postage, these downloads are available for $5 for the Two Centuries book, and $4 for the 1937 yearbook.

Take a look at the New Milford page of our website for more information!

The New Milford seal as it appeared on the front of the original book

Or, have a look at our catalog!

Child’s Gazetteer of Sullivan County, NY

Child’s Gazetteer of Sullivan County, NY is one of only a few printed sources of Sullivan County, NY historical data contemporaneous with the time it was published.  It’s generally considered essential if you’re doing anything serious with the history or genealogy of the New York county that went on, 75 years later, to become “The Borscht Circuit”.

The book includes both historical material about each township in the county, as well as the expected tables of households replete with the name of the head of household, the business they are in, and, for farmers (which most people did at least as a sideline back then) the number of acres they held.  The advertisements sprinkled throughout the volume are a study in themselves.   Realizing that someone’s name can appear many places in the volume, we compiled our own index of the book, something we felt was lacking and something we needed for our own purposes.

For more than a decade we have offered our scanned version of that important book on a CD-ROM, including the index we compiled of that book, for $20.  As we have been phasing out our CD-ROM line, replacing it with downloads, Child’s Gazetteer came up for republication, and we’re happy to say that it’s now available as a download at a huge saving over the CD-ROM price.  The download is only $4.50.

You may be wondering why we chose to republish this as a download when there are free versions of the book available online already.   Here are the reasons:

  1. Our version is high resolution page images, and you can read it easily.  The free versions, sadly, are low resolution and portions are actually illegible.
  2. Our version includes our index.  The free versions lack an index.
  3. A key part of the original book was a large fold-out map.  Ours is reproduced so that it’s actually usable.  Legibility is a real problem with the free versions.

(By the way, we’ve done a recent post on why we elect to republish things that are already available for free — Click HERE to read it, if you’re interested.)

If our republication of Child’s Gazetteer of Sullivan County, NY for 1872-73 is of interest to you, why not have a look at our main website.  HERE’s the link directly to the page with more descriptive material and the download.

 

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