Neversink downloads

We’re happy to say that with the availability of these Neversink Downloads, we’ve completed the migration from CD-ROMs to exclusively downloads!

“Old Neversink”  was our all-time best-selling CD-ROM, and, appropriately, it was the last to completely migrate to our modern world of downloads.

In that connection, we are very happy to again make available to you the following four items from the Old Neversink CD-ROM:

Eugene Cross 1910 Diary with index.   See the Old Neversink page

Child’s Gazetteer extract for Neversink, with index.  See the Old Neversink page

Neversink Genealogy with index.  See the Old Neversink page

Quinlan’s History of Sullivan County extract for Neversink, with index. See the Old Neversink page

Considerably more information about each of these is available on the Neversink page, so rather than simply say it again here, please have a look there!

CLICK to go to the Neversink page now

Included in these four downloads are two Neversink excerpts from larger publications of ours, Child’s Gazetteer of Sullivan County, and Quinlan’s History of Sullivan County.  Some people have mentioned to us that these excerpts are easier to handle than the file representing the full book, and that they are happy to have them available to work with in this form.  They’re short enough to print out, if you are more comfortable working from paper (as many of us secretly are!)

And, if you haven’t looked at our Neversink offerings recently, you might want to take a peek anyway — we have several items that we’ve added since the CD-ROM first came out that may be of interest to you.  (Needless to say, we do hope you will check out these four Neversink downloads while you are there!)

To the Neversink page!

Neversink Downloads
Some old Neversinkers, admiring the sidewalk they just coompleted

Annals of Winchester is back

Annals of Winchester is back
Annals of Winchester is back

Annals of Winchester, previously one of our best-selling CD-ROMs, had been unavailable since we discontinued our CD-ROM business to concentrate on low-cost, immediately available downloads.

However, we’ve had several requests for this classic, which, to anticipate a question we were asked many times about the CD, Annals of Winchester DOES include the history of Winsted.

If you are seeking historical information about the Town of Winchester, or Winsted, or the people who lived there and the businesses that made this an important manufacturing center, Annals of Winchester is pretty much the go-to source.  It is indexed — and we have added an additional index of place names that we compiled — and, since it is in PDF format, easy to use on any computer.

There’s lots more information available on our Annals of Winchester page, so please have a look.  If you considered buying the CD originally but were put off by the price tag, you will find that the download version is a small fraction of that amount — and has the advantage of being an immediate download, not something you have to wait a week or more for the Post Office to deliver.

So, CLICK HERE to go to our Annals of Winchester page.

And join us in celebrating that Annals of Winchester is back!

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.

 

 

Early Records of Warwick, Rhode Island

We’ve undertaken the process of republishing the contents of our discontinued CD-ROM “Rhode Island Collection #1” with the re-issuance of Early Records of Warwick, Rhode Island as a download.

This is quite a remarkable document (all 362 pages of it).  Probably originally recorded in his own shorthand by the Honorable Rev. Samuel Gorton, the first governor of that specific colony, it is a comprehensive compendium of the minutiae that the local council dealt with, ranging from disputes over land to the ear-marks that distinguished each citizen’s cattle.

It’s not an easy read due to the meticulous accuracy the compiler devoted to it — she is faithful to original spellings and what today we would consider grammatical errors — but if you have ancestors from that area in the period just following 1640, this is pretty much a “most have”.  There are no fewer than four indices included in the book.

One note:  there are free versions of Early Records of Warwick, Rhode Island  available online, and we encourage you to examine them to see if they meet your needs.  Our scans are ultra high resolution, and the PDF format is superior to many e-book formats, however, so we’re not embarrassed to ask $3.50 for our download.

To learn more about this important document, and to follow our progress converting our earlier CD-ROM to downloads, please click HERE to go to the appropriate page of our main website.   If you are interested in our Rhode Island material in general, please check our main Rhode Island page HERE.

Rhode Island

 

 

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.

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.

 

The Fulton-Fraser Cemetery in Ferndale, NY

Gertrude Barber’s compilation of the Fulton-Fraser Cemetery in Ferndale, a hamlet in the Town of Liberty, New York was an achievement of hers in the 1929-1930 timeframe.

Her typescripts, done at a time when few perceived much value in collecting such information, have become a genealogical mainstay for those researching in Sullivan County, New York, and this cemetery, another in the Town of Liberty, is another example of her work.

Fulton-Fraser Cemetery
The first page of Mrs. Barber’s compilation of the Fulton-Fraser Cemetery in Ferndale, Town of Liberty, New York

We do not know the current status of this cemetery, or even where in Ferndale it is (or was?) located. We can hope that today it is known by another name and is being cared for.  However, her description of the run-down state of the cemetery nearly a century ago suggests that this may not be the case, and, assuming that it continued to decline, it is worth considering that a compilation like this might not even be possible today.  This compilation includes our own index. 

CLICK HERE to access the main Liberty, NY page on our website for additional information and to download.

  

Gravestone Inscriptions of the Old Liberty Cemetery

Liberty, Sullivan County, New York

These inscriptions were collected by Gertrude Barber (1929-1930) as part of her effort to capture the rapidly disappearing local history of many Sullivan County communities.

Gertrude Barber, the person who collected and transcribed the gravestone inscriptions of the Old Liberty cemetery, one of a number she collected in the 1929-1930 period, deserves our thanks for this effort.  She spent her summers in the Sullivan County area collecting church and cemetery records, and during the winters transcribed her work using a manual typewriter and six carbons, which she deposited in major libraries that showed an interest in her work.  Not all did.  Not many people at the time were interested in this kind of material, or in this geographical area, and were it not for her efforts, much of the information on these stones would eventually be lost.  No doubt some already is.

We regret that she did not get around to collecting all of the cemeteries in Sullivan County, but we are grateful for those she did do.  There are no doubt errors in her copying and transcription.  Again, because of the magnitude – and difficulty — of the copying and transcription task she undertook we readily forgive her errors and are thankful again that she undertook the task at all.

We are delighted to make this compilation of the old section of the Liberty, Sullivan County, New York cemetery, together with the index we compiled of it, available as a download.

Please CLICK HERE to go to the Liberty page of our main website for more information and to download Gravestone Inscriptions of the Old Liberty Cemetery.

Recovering history
Between the Lakes Group helps you recover history!

The Graduates of Emory College (1910)

Our second publication of Southern History in the last month is this important volume listing the occupations and addresses of more than 1000 graduates of Emory College (now Emory University) in Georgia.

The volume includes some history of the college and other supporting documents, but most important is the information provided about the graduates themselves.  Here’s the table of contents:

Emory Alumni Register
Table of Contents

More information is available at our main website, where you can also download this document.

EMORY ALUMNI REGISTER

Abbreviations for Organizations

“What does that stand for?”

Is this a question you’ve ever asked when you see a string of letters that pretty clearly refers to an organization of some kind?   When you can’t tell from the context what KIND of organization?  A lodge?  A religious group?  A self-insurance plan? A political party?   A company?  A governmental department? Even a railroad?

If you’ve asked that question, you’ve got company.  Acronyms, initialisms, and abbreviations for organizations have been around ever since the Roman legions walked around with “SPQR” on poles (that was an initialism for Senatus Populesque Romanus, by the way).  We’ve asked that question over and over for a long time, and we decided to do something about it.

This is what we did:

Amazon_screen
This is what our new book looks like on Amazon.com

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

We wrote a book — 318 pages, mostly an alphabetical listing of abbreviations, acronyms, and initialisms for organizations of all kinds.  Now we’ve published it, and you can see it on Amazon.com.  (Of course, if you’re so inclined — and we hope that you are — you can also buy it there!).

So, CLICK HERE to see it on Amazon.  You might just decide that it really fills a need.

 

 

 

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