Category: Local history

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.

 

Recovering history
Between the Lakes Group helps you recover history!

Liberty High School Annual for 1919

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

1919 graduates
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.

Paxton, MA
The old Paxton Inn, Paxton, MA
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.

 

History of the Town of Litchfield, CT

Alain White wrote this book around 1920 for the Litchfield Historical Society, and it’s the definitive history of the Litchfield Township from the point where the early town histories leave off until the point when White’s book went to press.

Litchfield map
Litchfield Map from White’s History of the Town of Litchfield

Several years ago, we scanned, indexed, and published the book as a CD-ROM — and it was a moderately good seller.

Then, two things happened:

  1.  Technology advanced.  CDs fell out of favor, replaced by downloads
  2.  Several not for profit organizations scanned lots of historical works and made them available for free.

Retiring the CD was not a difficult decision at that point.

But there were two downsides:

  1.  The free downloads did not have the index we painstakingly created of this book, and
  2.   While the free downloads are certainly legible, the quality of the reproduction of the images leaves a bit to be desired (compared with our high-resolution scans).

If you’ll go to the page on our main website about this book, you’ll see where you can get a free download of this book (minus the index, and at decent but not great resolution).

You’ll also have the opportunity to purchase and download our version, which DOES include the index and the high resolution scans.  (We also provide a free list of everything that showed up in the index so you can decide before purchasing whether our index is worth the money.)

 

Three Court Calendars – Sullivan County, NY

Three Court Calendars of the Sullivan County Court.

July 1893 term, June 1899 term, and January 1904 term.

To us these are quite novel.  Although they were obviously very familiar to practicing attorneys a century and more ago, we have not encountered other specimens of similar material.

Sullivan County Court Calendar
Title page of a court calendar for Sullivan County, NY

Information includes the attorneys in the county were at that time (they’re listed),  the county officers  (likewise listed), and, interestingly, the grand jurors and the trial jurors for the term are listed too.  It specifies which cases would be heard, and approximately upon what date.

Among the litigants, we say some familiar names, including a railroad that was never completed – the Liberty and Jeffersonville Electric Railway – suggesting that without even operating it succeeded in running afoul of some people (the investors, perhaps?).  Regardless of its historical value, it’s fascinating to look at these relics of a judicial system that is now transformed into a far different animal.

More about this, as well as the opportunity to purchase a download of it, can be found on the Sullivan County page of our main website.

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

Early Sullivan County Timeline

 

Quinlan’s History of Sullivan County is considered the definitive history of Sullivan County, New York up until 1873.

James H. Quinlan, historian
James H. Quinlan, historian

While we were working through those early years in Quinlan’s History, we discovered that it was sometimes hard to tie all those events together in a sequential way.  To help us understand Sullivan County history better, we decided to use Quinlan to help develop a timeline of those years.  Suddenly much was made clear.

We’re glad to be able to offer this timeline free for your use.  Just click below to download it with our compliments.

Sullivan County Timeline to 1873

If you find that this timeline raises your curiosity and makes you want to read the whole book, there’s no reason not to do so.  There are several free scanned versions of Quinlan you can download, but our favorite is one scanned by Penn State University.  A link to a free version we like is on our main website on our Quinlan page, HERE.

After you download it, you might discover what we did:  that a 700 page book really needs an index.  No one can fault Quinlan for not providing one, given all that he did provide us with.  But we did decide to do something to make up for his omission.  We indexed Quinlan ourselves.  While you are on our Quinlan page, you will probably notice that we sell our index.  Frankly, it was a lot of work, and we think you will find that it is worth the price.

 

History of Garland, Maine

We are happy to announce the re-publication of this comprehensive 1912 History of Garland, Maine, by Lyndon Oak, as a download.

Lyndon Oak
Lyndon Oak, author of History of Garland, Maine

This volume, which includes a 12 page index, includes just about anything you might ever want to know about Garland from its founding until just after the Civil War.  If you are interested in Penobscot County, ME, the History of Garland, Maine should be of interest to you.

To help you more easily determine whether this is of interest to you, we also have provided the index to this volume on our website (where you can also order the download).

Visit our page about this book by clicking HERE.