Last month we announced that we’re retiring our CD-ROM product line so we can concentrate on downloads. This will likely be your last chance to get the CD-ROMs!
Our first CD-ROM product
Here’s an inventory of our remaining CD-ROMs, and how many copies we still have left:
Child’s Gazetteer of Lewis County, NY — 1 left
Lime Rock: an illustrated walking tour — 2 left
Erie County directory for 1924 — 3 left
Child’s Gazetteer for Wayne County, NY — 4 left
Minisink and Port Jervis — 3 left
New Milford: 230 years — 1 left
Nevada, Missouri Directory – 1 left
History of Garland, Maine — 3 left
Suffield Quarter Millennial Plus — 2 left
New Index of Quinlan’s History of Sullivan County, NY — 1 left
Fountain County’s Activities in the World War — 2 left
Worcester Directory for 1871 — 4 left
Rhode Island volume 1 — 2 left
Genessee County Collection — 2 left
Catholic Families of Kentucky — 3 left
Blue Book of Newton. MA for 1910 — 2 left
History of Litchfield, CT — 3 left
Child’s Gazetteer of Sullivan County, NY — 3 left
Maine State Prison Report for 1907 — 4 left
Emory College Alumni Register for 1910 — 3 left
Landmarks and Memorials of Paxton, MA — 1 left
Memories of Liberty, NY volume 1 — 3 left
Middletown (CT) collection — 1 left
Memories of Liberty, NY volume 2 — 2 left
—When we run out of a particular CD-ROM, we won’t be offering that CD anymore.
—Shortly we will begin to convert the contents of discontinued CDs to our array of downloads. There will be some delay while we do so, but eventually much of the present CD content will be available as downloads.
If you’ve been contemplating buying one of our CD-ROMs, now is the time to act!! Here’s the CATALOG — take a look!
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:
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.
Our longer term customers will remember when Between the Lakes Group started selling CD-ROMs full of historical material.
Our first CD-ROM product
The first we offered was one of material from Liberty, NY — still the locality for which we have the most products available. The CD sold well, telling us that people were happy buying historical material on CDs, and encouraging us to continue to build our historical republication business. We followed with more than 30 additional CD-ROMs of historical material.
But that was “then”. Just as, back then, we were witnessing the demise of computer media like 3 1/2 inch “floppy” drives, today we are in the process of another technology sea change — and that is the demise of the CD-ROM as a highly popular vehicle for moving and storing information.
To tell the truth, we’ve seen this day coming for quite a while. We began shifting our new publications to downloads several years ago, and we’ve not produced a new CD-ROM in at least five years. During those years we’ve produced well over 200 downloads, and we intend to continue along that route.
The internet rules today, and the day of the CD-ROM has passed. Every week or so we hear from a customer who bought one of our CDs a few years ago and who now has a computer that doesn’t even have a drive that can read CDs. Beyond directing them to their local public library to find a PC that can read their CDs, or suggesting that they purchase a USB-connected portable CD reader, we have little we can offer these folks.
Except for one thing: we can reissue the material on our CD-ROMs as downloads. In fact, that’s what we’ve already done with some of the less popular CDs, and we’ve not yet heard a single complaint!
Once the material is available as downloads, we’ll keep the CDs available for sale until we run out, and then we’ll discontinue the CD versions. Presto! We will be living in more modern times.
Benefits
Benefits for you, our customers, include:
Instant gratification. You can download the material you want with no waiting for the postman.
Lower prices. It costs us far less to provide material to you via download than it does via CD-ROM, and we pass those savings along to you.
More material available. Producing a new download can happen almost as soon as we have the material — no waiting until we have a CD-ROM full of stuff.
No deteriorating CDs. We’ve not seen this problem yet, but we’ve been advised to expect CDs that we shipped a decade ago will begin to fail.
Easier to store your information. You can put the PDF file of our download right in the same folder on your computer where you store your own notes on that subject, not in a paper folder or a CD box somewhere to misplace or discard in error.
At any rate, you will see this process — the process of converting from CD-ROM to downloads — speeding up going forward. We think you’ll be very happy with the result!
To see what we have for a particular locality or interest of yours, why not visit our catalog today!
See our catalog of local history, genealogy, and Americana
Here’s a genealogy, done some time ago by Between the Lakes Group partner Judith Sherman, that’s been hiding in plain sight for a number of years. We had planned to publish it years ago, but the manuscript got buried, and time passed, and we just uncovered it yesterday!
Here’s the sales blurb:
Gabriel Jackson of Polk County, North Carolina: one line of descent
by Judith Moore Sherman (Brown) (1987)
We think that this work, by one of the partners of Between the Lakes Group, will be helpful for two reasons (beyond the careful scholarship that went into its preparation).
First, genealogy in the mountains of western North Carolina is outright difficult to research. The area was too transient for too long, and largely with people for whom the written word may have historically been more of an enemy than a friend. The extent to which government in the form of records of vital statistics was present was at best limited. That religious communities in the area were continually in flux for many reasons, but in large measure because of a lack of well-educated clergy, largely eliminated the other usual source of genealogical source material. The area, while not subject to depredations during the Civil War, had a disadvantage nonetheless: division of loyalties between the north and the south. That this family produced a southern lieutenant while many or most of the names in the book are more closely associated with northern sympathizers serves to illustrate the point
Second, Jackson is a very common name. While the difficulty attending research of names like Brown and Smith and Jones and Johnson are well known, the Jackson surname has certainly been among the 10 most common in the United States, and it was especially true at this time.
The document is available as a downloaded PDF file. It’s 80 pages long and includes ancestry charts and an index of names. We offer it for $7.50. Please click the “Buy Now” button to download the document to your computer.
…and here’s what we’re trying!
Normally, when we sell something here on our blog, we refer people to our main website. That seems like the usual practice, but it occurred to us that we don’t really need to cause you the extra work.
So, we decided to see how it might work if we offered the possibility of buying this download right here! The price is the same ($7.50) but it’s a little more efficient, we think.
If the genealogy is of interest, try the easy way of getting it. Just click the “Buy Now” button and get the download immediately.
Of course, we’re also delighted if you visit our main website too.
Virtually all local history material is of value to genealogists and historians. Only in the past year or two, however, have the large genealogy companies (ancestry.com, for example) hit on the quantity and quality of genealogical and historical material contained in high school and college yearbooks and annuals. And, they have begun to offer copies of some of these on their websites.
We’re happy to say that we were more than a decade ahead of the giants in recognizing the importance of yearbooks and in beginning their re-publication here at Between the Lakes Group.
Because of all the recent attention directed to yearbooks, we decided to list all of the yearbooks available from us, in the order of the year the yearbook was originally published, all on a single page. There you’ll also find links to the location on our site you can find more information about them. You can see that list on our Yearbooks page — just CLICK HERE to review it.
We’ll have a few posts on the subject of yearbooks — particularly high school yearbooks — and how you can use them. For what? Well, for starters, to fill out the lives of people you may be researching, to learn more about the communities you’re interested in, and even to establish an elusive connection to a family member. Those posts will come as we write them in the next few days and weeks, so check back here for them.
The occasion that really prompted this page was our republication of the Port Jervis, NY High School yearbook for 1938, “Senior Memoirs”. A pretty hefty yearbook (as they go) at 138 pages, with a few rarities in it (such as senior horoscopes to supplement the more standard Last Will and Testament section, and, hearkening back to yearbooks of two or three decades earlier, prize stories and poems), it is one of several Port Jervis High School yearbooks that we have republished. It can be found on our Orange County, NY page.
(You’ll also see there the very first appearance of our snappy new “buy now” button!)
Our experience has been that using available gazetteers to get a comprehensive overview of a county or a community is a great way to get started finding out about a new area.
Nearly always they have lists of inhabitants (usually heads of households) at a point in time about a year before the publication date of the gazetteer in question. That’s almost enough to justify using these sources all by itself!
However, they — particularly those originally published by Hamilton Child in the 1870s and 1880s in New York State and Vermont — have a wealth of additional valuable information. (We republish other gazetteers too, but let’s concentrate on this set for a moment.)
For example, often there is a county map. There are capsule histories of each township in the county, which usually include population statistics. Generally there’s short description of the educational system, some details about each community in the county, and a list of the houses of worship in the township with some statistics here as well.
We always find the advertisements — and the economics of gazetteer publishing dictated that there would be lots and lots of them — fascinating vignettes of rural life in that time period.
Gazetteers are also (justifiably) criticized as containing a fair number of pages of what can best be described as boilerplate, which appear in virtually all editions of that publisher’s gazetteers. Examples include short descriptions of the states and territories, stamp duties, postal rates and regulations, popular nostrums of the time, and the like. But this material (which actually is worth reading once, anyway) is not what you buy a gazetteer for: you buy one to learn about a county and what was in it.
A sample page from a gazetteer in New York State — heads of households and businesses
We’re happy to publish no less than three of Child’s gazetteers of various counties in New York State. If one of these counties circa 1873 is of interest to you, by all means have a look!
Hodgkin. Hotchkin. Hotchkiss. Three names for a single family?
In a word, yes. A fellow names John Hodgkin (sometimes also spelled Hodke) immigrated circa 1648 from England, settling in Guilford, Connecticut. He married and raised a family. And his descendents commonly used the three variants in this post’s title for their surnames, but, just to keep things interesting, also pluralized the first two of these on occasion, so one occasionally finds Hodgkins and Hotchkins as individual surnames. Compounding the problems, from a genealogical perspective, is the fact that a man named Samuel Hotchkiss arrived in New Haven proper around the same time. Samuel also produced a large family, but they at least stuck to Hotchkiss as a surname pretty generally.
If your reaction so far is a big “so what?” it’s not entirely a surprise. Back in the day spelling of surnames (and pretty much everything else) was an opportunity to exercise one’s creativity, so deviant spellings of surnames are a dime a dozen, really.
However, there were a few aspects of this family that are a bit more interesting than that.
First of all, how’s your British (and American colonial) history? John Hodgkin came here as part of a migration of Puritans from England — the fact that he settled in Connecticut rather than Massachusetts Bay Colony suggests that he was probably a very strict Puritan as well. He appears in the records as “Governor Leete’s man” so we find no reason that he would not have fit this pattern. Fast forward a few years, until the Puritan takeover (think Oliver Cromwell) in England, when the victors decided to execute the King they had deposed. The judges on that court became known, after the monarchy was restored, as the Regicides (and king-killing is not favorably viewed by monarchists in general).
So, unsurprisingly, the hunt for the Regicides began. Two, named Whalley and Goffe, had fled to New England (they were fortunate to get out of England alive) (for a list of all the Regicides and what happened to them, try Wikipedia). Since New England was still a British colony, they had not outrun the law, however, and the King’s agents searched for them here. They were spirited from house to house, from community to community, even from colony to colony — and one of their stopovers was with John Hodgkin and his family.
The Hodgkin/Hotchkin/etc. family tended, in subsequent generations, to produce clergymen, a few of whom developed well-deserved reputations as writers, and others of whom developed reputations for other things.
The writers included the Rev. James Hervey Hotchkin, who wrote an early history about the settlement of Western New York State (which we have re-published on CD-ROM — find more information HERE); and the Rev. S. F. Hotchkin (he defied family tradition and became an Episcopal priest) who wrote a series of local history books about Philadelphia and the surrounding area — we plan to republish one of these soon.
Less savory were Hotchkin clergymen who sided against a Connecticut girl marrying a Hawaiian native to the extent that he led a schism in the local Congregational church, and another who had a missionary interest in Native American and black women in the South around the time of the Civil War. He is notable not because he saved many souls, but because his ministrations to these unfortunate women produced a branch of the family referred to today as the Black Hotchkins.
John Hodgkin (Hotchkin) of Guilford, CT and his Descendents
All of this is prelude to the fact that the principal partner of Between the Lakes Group, along with a number of hard working and intelligent family members, back in the 1980s, produced a book entitled “John Hodgkin (Hotchkin) of Guilford, CT and his descendents”. The book sold out two printings in hard cover almost immediately — there are indeed many descendents of John Hotchkin, or at least many people who want to know about his and the family he produced — and now we have re-published it in digital form as a download. If you go HERE to our New Haven, CT page, you can learn more about this download — and perhaps enjoy a copy of your own.
(We should add that unlike some in the genealogy biz, we believe that all lines, male and female, legitimatized by matrimony or not, deserve to be followed. In preparing this book we followed this practice, and we hope that you appreciate this and understand that as a result there are some surnames appearing in the index nearly as frequently as Hotchkin does — Beers is an example.)
Yup, Noah Cross was the progenitor of a whole bunch of people named “Cross” as well as a whole bunch who were, after a generation or two, NOT named Cross. Back in the days that we were celebrating the bicentennial of the United States, a lot of families got busy doing their genealogy, and the descendents of Noah Cross were no different.
And, the descendents of Noah Cross were more successful than most! Thanks mainly to the efforts of one Loyal Cross, one of Noah’s descendents, as well as a few other hard workers, in 1976 a “book” of the descendents of Noah Cross was published. We use the word “published” advisedly for a couple of reasons. First of all, there was no sense at that time that this compendium was a finished product. They had not traced all his lines of descendents. They had not yet gotten him back “across the pond”. And the “book” was mimeographed and designed to be kept in a three ring binder for the frequent updates everyone was sure would come soon and in quantity. Also, the “book” lacked an index.
One of our first tasks in the genealogical community was to index the Cross family book. It was a lot of work, but at least the book had an index, and it was possible to find people in it. We Xeroxed the index and send copies of it to a few people, and it seemed to get a life of its own — but this was a decade after the book itself had been circulated.
Around the same time, another researcher was able to fill in some important blanks about Noah Cross, and the story got about 300% more exciting. It seems that he was born in Somerset, England. In his late teens, he found himself a soldier in the British Army, in a regiment of foot (that means infantry). (We don’t know what his decision process regarding joining the Army was, or even whether he had much say in the process, and we frankly suspect the latter.)
Soon, he found himself (and his regiment) stationed on Long Island, New York. Whether he found Army life intolerable or whether he saw opportunity as only a young man can in a new land is not something we are ever likely to know the answer to. But we do know that he, along with two of his buddies, deserted and made their way to Ulster County, NY. (We should say here that deserting from the Army was not then and is not today a risk-free activity — back in those days if you were caught you likely would have been executed.)
We do not know how Noah Cross and his buddies made it from present day Nassau County, NY across the East River (or the Long Island Sound) and then across the Hudson River and sixty miles upstate. He was likely to have had very little money and must have had to try to stay out of the clutches of those who might return him to the Army. But somehow the three of them did make it up into the Shawangunk Mountains of Ulster County, where he and his friends became acquainted with girls of Dutch heritage whose families lived there.
Now, there is no reason why the Dutch families would have been eager to turn the deserters in. After all, these families had put down roots in New York when it was still New Amsterdam and likely resented the British. Also, these were three fit young men, well able to marry their daughters and contribute to the community. The three deserters married the three Dutch girls not many months after deserting.
Along came the Revolutionary War. Noah Cross enlisted — quite possibly he was urged strongly to do so by his new family — and served. He and his wife had children, and eventually he died. But the rest of the story is in the book, and you may just want to have a look at it.
Who knows? You might find your name or the name of one of your relatives!!
Sullivan County, located about 100 miles northwest of New York City in the foothills of the Catskill Mountains, is where the founder of Between the Lakes Group was born and grew up. His parents, and two of his grandparents (and their grandparents) had lived there for most or all of their lives.
Today they would have been called packrats — and that’s good, because it meant that when Between the Lakes started up in 1999 we already had a wealth of historical material about Sullivan County in our archives (a polite name for cardboard boxes in the attic).
The consequence is particularly good for you if you are curious about Sullivan County or any of its towns and villages or any of its histories (because there have been quite a few of them).
Topics we cover that you might find interesting include all of the townships:
–Bethel (yup, the site of the famous Woodstock Festival)
–Callicoon
–Cochecton
–Delaware (on the Delaware River)
–Fallsburgh (or Fallsburg) (including Mountaindale, Woodridge, and others) (one of the three hubs of the “Golden Triangle” of the Borscht Circuit
–Forestburgh
–Fremont
–Highland
–Liberty (our hometown) (another of the three hubs of the “Golden Triangle”, the site of Loomis Sanitarium and of Grossingers)
–Lumberland
–Mamakating (the first town in the county)
–Neversink (one of the earliest towns, today the site of two New York City reservoirs; also one of the last remaining “dry” townships in the state)
–Rockland (and Roscoe and Livingston Manor — legendary trout country)
–Thompson (which most people know better as Monticello, but which also includes Kiamesha Lake) (the third hub of the “Golden Triangle”)
–Tusten
Two Sullivan County natives, Rube Hardenburgh and Jim Bonnell
Did we mention that we have lots and lots of Sullivan County material?
Why not CLICK HERE and check out what we’ve got (but be prepared to spend some time!)
