Here’s a new Q&A (Question and Answer)

Here’s a new Q&A (Question and Answer) we’ve written for our website. We thought it was important enough to publish on our blog as well. We invite your thoughts and comments!

Here’s the question:

You sell downloads of books that I can read for free online. Why should I pay you money to download a book I can read for free?

Here’s our answer:

Thanks for asking!

First off, there are many cases when you should definitely read the book as a free online rather than paying us (or someone else) for a download, or even buying a printed book! Here are a few examples:

—Is the book historical fiction about the area you’re interested in? Then, definitely read the freebie. Likely you’re reading it for pleasure, but even if you’re reading it in connection with an area you’re interested in, you’re most likely looking for a sense of what things were like back then in that locale, and there’s nothing like good historical fiction to give you that sense.

—Are you a little unsure whether the book is actually going to contain useful information? There are plenty of examples of this, but here’s one: you spot a genealogy with the same surname you’re seeking – but it’s not a particularly rare name. Use the free download to confirm it.

—Is your interest in this particularly area not quite focused yet? Here’s an example: many families migrated westward in steps; one generation in one locale, and the next a few hundred miles west. If you can find local history material that you can download for free about the locales where they stopped (and also where they passed through but didn’t settle) you can pick up a lot of information at no cost.

So, then, why should I buy a download instead of (or in addition to) using a freebie? Well, here are some factors to consider:

–Perhaps we’re offering something more than just the book itself. For example, perhaps we indexed the book we republished. The originals lacked an index, and we new one would add value, so we compiled one. Indexes can be terribly useful.

–Some free (and some paid) downloads offer a PDF search. You key in the term you’re after, and you’re presented with 100% matches. Well, we don’t care for PDF searches, because they’re too sensitive to seemingly inconsequential differences. They tend not to realize that “M’Cutcheon” is the same as “McCutcheon” or that Hodgkin, Hodke, Hotchkiss, Hotchkin, Hodkins, Hotchkins, Hochkin, and a variety of others are all the same family in different places at different times. PDF search for “Hotchkin” and you won’t get matches on “Hochkin” and vice versa. With an index to check, you’ve got a fighting chance of picking up those minor differences. And, with a PDF search, such a minor daily occurrence in old time print shops as a damaged letter being used in setting a paragraph of type can result in a missed match.

–If you happen to be downloading files on your phone or your iPad, or somewhere else where you’re subject to a data plan, downloading the same file repeatedly can chew up your monthly data allocation pretty rapidly.

–Depending on where you download your free download from, there may be difficulties in copying or printing selections from the download. In most cases these are designed to be difficult to copy. We design our downloads so you can copy or print just as much of it as you want.

–This is a big one, particularly if you’re planning on publishing your work and need accurate footnotes or bibliographic citations – or if you’re applying to a hereditary society and need to be able to direct the genealogist to the specific mention in a larger book. Most e-books, and many other publishing forms used for online books for download do not retain page numbers. (Some, of course, do.) Our downloads are page images, including not only original page numbers but even marginal doodling (or notes someone may have made in the copy we scanned).

–Realistically, people don’t expect ultra high quality images in downloads. After all, you’re unlikely to want to frame an image from a download and hang it on the wall! However, it is worth noting that the image quality in most free downloads is pretty bad. Sufficiently so that it can be hard to tell what a person looks like. Ours are not gallery quality, but we think they’re pretty good representations of what’s in the book. Also, if you’ve looked at many free downloads, you’ll notice occasionally a page gets folded over in the scanning process. What you see is what you get. Because we hand-scan all of our material, you simply don’t have that problem with our downloads.

–In our day of government austerity, when state and Federal budget shortfalls seem to be covered by cuts in museums, libraries, archives, and that sort of thing, it’s not hard to imagine that given a choice between paying the staff and keeping a set of free downloads available online, the free downloads are apt to go first. Remember that no matter who provides it, it does cost someone money to provide downloads, whether free or not. Once you’ve purchased one of our downloads, you own it and you can access it whenever you want.

Bottom Line

Hotchkin's History of Western New York State — Hotchkin’s History of Western New York State

It’s always a good idea to see if you can save a little money on incidental purchases, so by all means do check to see if you can locate a free download of a book or other document you want to read. But please consider what trade-off you’re making.

By the way, we’ve recently republished an important book about the history of the settlement of western New York State as a download (previously we sold it as a CD-ROM). It’s Hotchkin’s History of Western New York. It’s pretty good! Have a look!

Adams Center High School Annual – 1922

Adams Center, Jefferson County, NY

We’ve just published another high school yearbook — this one nearly a century old — so we thought we ought to comment on this particular one. High school yearbooks capture moments in time – or at least the best of them do. This one, soft cover and limited size included, give us a glimpse of this Jefferson County community at the beginning of the Roaring Twenties – an era which would change American culture in significant ways. It also represents a time when there seemed to not yet be a consensus about exactly what belonged in a high school yearbook, as the contents of this number illustrates.

Adams Center High School 1922 — Adams Center High School – Annual for 1922

First, the graduates that year numbered seven. That’s not exactly a large graduating class. So, absent was the customary bunch of pages of portraits and accomplishments. A single photo suffices for the class. There is a senior class history. A senior class will. A senior class prophecy and a class poem. An address by the class president, followed by a response by a member of the junior class. Then follows a series of essays: “The United States Merchant Marine” “The Grand Canyon of Arizona” “A Drama” (about Shakespeare’s Macbeth) “Helen Hunt Jackson” (identified as one of the most famous women in the United States; unknown today, she seems to have been an advocate for Native Americans).

Remarks by the Principal at the presentation of diplomas are followed by an article advocating for a new high school. Then comes a curious table called “School Census, 1921-1922 – Incomplete Returns” which we presume was humorous. With prohibition in effect, next comes the obligatory article “Alcohol as a Menace”, followed by a light-hearted section called “Ifs” and a “Who’s Who”. A photo of the baseball team is followed by a history of the school, which is in turn followed by reports on the various sports teams.

Unexpected contents

Then comes a real oddity: the constitution and by-laws of the Ontario Interscholastic Baseball League. (we are still scratching our collective heads over that one!). Then some current poetry – again, presumably humorous if you knew the individuals mentioned. Some more humor is punctuated by a photo of the girls’ basketball team.

Rather abruptly a photo of the Adams Center High School faculty appears, along with the list of the members of the board of education. A boon here for family historians, next to come is a list of alumni by class, including their present city of residence. Class years begin with 1899, and the compilation is acknowledged to be incomplete. Then comes a list of the members of each class of the high school – including two post grads – and a list by class of those in the elementary school. Ten pages of advertisements wrap up the book.

Yes, we do have it for sale as a download. If you’re sold on this one, go right to it on our Jefferson County, NY page.

But we have republished quite a number of yearbooks now, so if you would like to see them all listed in one place, you can go directly to our yearbook page.

Our Current Best Sellers

Back when our business was creating and selling local history CD-ROMs we found that people were interested in which ones were the most popular. Now that we sell downloads (with the exception of the fast-dwindling remaining inventory of a few of our CDs), we thought that people might enjoy knowing which downloads sell best. (If you’d like to view our entire catalog, you can find it HERE).

Here’s the Best Seller List:

#1 — Sullivan County, NY Index of Wills

#2 — Cross – New York State 1775 – 1975

#3 — Harte: Early Iron Industry of Connecticut

#4 — A History of the Town of Jefferson by Mildred L. Bailey

#5 — Sullivan County Intestate Estates

We decided to cut the list off at five — but maybe the next time we’ll provide the top ten. What do you think?

To everyone: thanks for your patronage!!

Recovering history — Between the Lakes Group helps you recover history!

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.

Suffield History and Genealogy

Suffield history and genealogy took a step forward this week, as we re-published some documents that should be genuinely helpful.

Suffield Quarter Millennial — We’ve re-published Suffield: Quarter Millennial

Here are the four:

Suffield Quarter Millennial — this book encompasses the history of Suffield, CT from its founding until the time of the celebration, is also the program for the celebration, and has tons of additional Suffield information in it.
An annual report from Suffield’s Congregational Church. Town (and church) history, lists of pastors, lists of members and also “absent members”
A Sagitta yearbook from Suffield High School
A package of miscellany, including an article from the first volume of the Connecticut Quarterly, a short excerpt from the Connecticut Guide, and a lot of photos.

You can find all this Suffield history and genealogy on our Suffield page on our main website. If Suffield, CT is of interest to you, have a look today!

Centennial Book of Liberty, NY

The Centennial Book of Liberty, NY is one of the less frequently seen documents of the history of that township. We’re indebted to Denny Birmingham for lending us her copy of this now-scarce document for copying and re-publication.

What’s in it?

First, and most obviously, there are pictures – lots of them. Most of the important building are shown, both commercial establishments and residences as well. There are photos that illustrate the original settlement on Revonah in a way that makes it comprehensible to people living today. (An interesting note here: the name of the mountain had already changed from Hanover to Revonah when this book was published – often the date of the change is assumed to coincide with anti-German sentiment during World War I.) The photos of the residences are fascinating as one tries to recognize the houses of today’s Liberty among them. Most of the photos have been seen elsewhere, but the collection is a good one.

The text is very useful since it amplifies on the early history found in Quinlan’s History, and also fills in details of the years following Quinlan’s publication in 1872. While the photos are a bit hard to relate to people today, there are also photographs of some of the leading citizens.

As mentioned, it is a modest book for a centennial volume, at least compared with some of this genre we have seen. However, we think it will be useful to anyone with an interest in Liberty today and in its past. We have compiled and included an index of the book including all names mentioned which should be helpful to those using the book for research only and not reading it through.

How to get the Centennial Book of Liberty, NY

Well, we happen to sell it as a download!

Want more information? CLICK HERE to go to the Liberty, NY page on our main website, where you can read a bit more about it and download it.

A Wartime Yearbook

We’ve just re-published the 1942 Libertas yearbook from Liberty High School in Liberty, Sullivan County, New York.

You can be excused if your immediate response is “What? You’ve published another Liberty High School yearbook? What’s your plan? To re-publish all of them?”

To tell the truth, we wouldn’t mind re-publishing all of Liberty High’s historic yearbooks, but realism tells us that we could never possibly find copies of all of them to scan — which gets us around to why the 1942 Libertas is different and interesting.

A Wartime Yearbook

First of all, it is a wartime yearbook! Published only months after Pearl Harbor, it is still the only example from Liberty High School that we have of this genre. There are many things that this yearbook has in common with non-wartime yearbooks (it has all the usual contents, for example, including photos with names of grades seven through twelve, and abundant advertisements) but the moment you pick the original up you notice that it has a soft cover rather than the typical hardbound book cover.

Later in the war, yearbooks began to reflect a nation actively gearing to to support the war efforts. Later yearbooks included lists of students who had left high school to serve and, eventually, in memoriam pages for those who would not be returning home.

Nonetheless, this is indeed a wartime yearbook. We think it’s worth a look. You can do so, and, if you wish, purchase a download of it, on our Liberty, NY page. CLICK HERE to go directly there.

Methodist Church Records – Town of Liberty, NY Circuit

Back in the years preceding and following the dawn of the 20th century, the larger Sullivan County, NY, villages, such as Liberty and Monticello, had their own Methodist Episcopal (what the Methodists used to be called) churches with full-time clergy. However, the smaller villages and hamlets might have had a church building, but the clergy was shared between several villages. If you’ve heard the term “circuit rider” that’s what these clergy were. They carried the records of each of the churches with them as they rode the circuit.

In the Town of Liberty, in Sullivan County, NY, there was a circuit that served White Sulphur Springs (then called Robertsonville), Swan Lake (then called Stevensville), and Harris (then known as Strongtown). A succession of ministers served that circuit, and their compiled records are available to us, thanks to the diligence of Gertrude Barber back in 1929.

About church records

Church records, with variations depending upon denomination, tend to have records of liturgical events: baptisms, confirmations (“joining the church”), marriages, and funerals, with occasional lists of all the members of a particular church at a particular point in time. In an area that did not have state-mandated capture of birth, marriage, and death statistics until rather late (and then it was not infrequently neglected), church records can be the most important source of such data, surpassing even family Bibles due to their concentration of information about a locality.

Methodist Church Records: Town of Liberty, NY Circuit

We had previously included this compilation on one of our Memories of Liberty CD-ROMs, but now that we have discontinued our CD line, this one gets to stand on its own. For anyone with ancestors in the more rural parts of the Town of Liberty, or someone interested in the history of these areas, this collection is very important. We’ve also compiled our own index of the records.

Please CLICK HERE to see more information and to download this collection.

Liberty High School Annual for 1919

The Liberty High School Annual for 1919 was the first-ever yearbook Liberty High School published.

Some of the 1919 graduates from Liberty High School

About yearbooks

High school yearbooks are one form of history within which everyone is recorded when they graduate from high school. They, and their community, are frozen at a point in time that the yearbook captures and keeps. Haircuts, clothes, friends, teachers, the sense of humor of the era, the area businesses – they are all captured as they were, not as we choose to remember them or tell our children they were back in the good old days.

1919 versus today

The class of 1919 graduated before a period of major social change, as a cursory examination of the yearbook will demonstrate. First off, the size of the class demonstrated the extent to which completion of a high school education was not a general expectation. In a community that had not changed that much in size between 1919 and the later, post WWII yearbooks we republish, this graduating class is tiny. Viewing the credentials of the faculty, it’s clear that the expectation that a high school teacher would have even a baccalaureate degree is a creature of the near-century that elapsed since this class graduated.

The function of the yearbook has also changed, quite clearly. More recent yearbooks are almost entirely about the class graduating, and on the activities in which they were participants. This issue turns the focus back to those who went to Liberty High School in previous years, even decades. From our point of view today, capturing this much news about Liberty High School alumni dating back into the previous century (the first class with alumni reporting was the class of 1893) is a book for those searching for a larger population than a single year’s graduating class.

It’s available!

You’ll not be surprised that we’re offering the Liberty High School Annual for 1919 as a download. Interested? CLICK HERE to see it on our main website.

Landmarks and Memories of Paxton, MA

We’re happy to republish a remarkable history of Paxton, Massachusetts, written by a person who without question knew more about the history of Paxton, MA than anyone else living at the time she prepared it. Roxa Howard Bush was a careful and very complete local historian of Paxton, and despite the brevity of her book (62 pages of text, plus pictures), it is a remarkably complete study of the history of the Town of Paxton. The book was privately printed in 1923. We do not know the number of copies printed, but we do know that few copies are still extant and even fewer available in the rare book market.

Unlike many local histories that are long on flowery language and short on names, places, and dates, Landmarks and Memories of Paxton is densely packed with names, and for that reason will be of particular interest to family historians and genealogists.

If you live now in the Paxton area, or if your ancestors lived there at one time, we suspect you will find this summary of the local history of Paxton and its people essential.

CLICK HERE to go to the page on our main website about Landmarks and Memories of Paxton, MA and how to purchase the download of it.

Category: Local history

Here’s a new Q&A (Question and Answer)

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Adams Center High School Annual – 1922