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 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:
Technology advanced. CDs fell out of favor, replaced by downloads
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:
The free downloads did not have the index we painstakingly created of this book, and
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 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.
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.
Here’s another new download from the Connecticut Quarterly, Volume IV (1898).
It did not take much to be considered a Tory during the times of the American Revolution — being committed to maintaining the status quo was really the only requirement to be categorized as such. As a consequence, Connecticut had many, many people who fell in this category.
As the article points out, not all were subjected to criminal prosecution, but there were many ways in which Connecticut’s Tories paid for their loyalty to King and to the status quo. The “Tory effect” was also lasting. Descendents of Tories often found that it was prudent to move westward rather than stay in their Connecticut home towns with the stigma of being the child or even later descendant of a Tory.
This could result in whole communities forming in newly settled areas in which the occupants generally were guarded about where they came from and why they had elected to settle where they did.
A few years ago we republished the high school yearbook of the class of 1932 from Rockville High School in Connecticut.
Now we are happy to offer a rare chance to be able to look back on these students a quarter century (and one great depression and two wars) later with their 25th reunion program.
Rockville High School Class of 1932 25th Reunion
More information about this program, now available as a download, is on the Tolland County page of our main website.
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:
Table of Contents
More information is available at our main website, where you can also download this document.
Quinlan’s History of Sullivan County is considered the definitive history of Sullivan County, New York up until 1873.
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.
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.
This is one of the oldest high school yearbooks we’ve republished, and also one of the best. High school yearbooks were different animals, back before the roaring 20s — indeed, high schools were! Not everyone went to high school, just for openers.
Hartford, Connecticut, was also a different city. Hartford was prosperous then. This was a time when the city (and probably the state) were governed by the “Seven Bishops” — the Episcopal Bishop of Connecticut, and the CEOs of the six major insurance companies headquartered there that made Hartford the Insurance Capital of America.
This is a remarkable social document, and it is available now as a download now, for $5.00.
We are happy to announce the re-publication of this comprehensive 1912 History of Garland, Maine, by Lyndon Oak, as a download.
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).
This is an important piece of Confederate military history, one that has not been published elsewhere. At the same time, it is a snapshot of one of the most important cities of the Confederacy during the early years of the Civil War.
When Charleston, SC, was under martial law during the Civil War (or the War Between the States), the person in command of the entire city was the Provost Marshal of Charleston. He was responsible for all activities in the city, both military and civilian.
During this period, the Provost Marshal, Colonel Alexander Haskell Brown, kept a “letter book” that today serves as a chronicle of the period of military law. (For those who might not know the concept of a letter book, back in the days before typewriters and carbon paper, official correspondence was hand written, then hand copied to a “letter book” so a record of the correspondence could be kept. Frequently, correspondence received was also copied to the letter book. As you can imagine, this letter book covers many topics germane to a city under martial law.)
Robert G. (Gerry) Carroon, the editor of this document, hand copied the original letter book, which is in the archives of the University of South Carolina, and transcribed it. A number of years ago, at his request, we published this document on CD-ROM. When we discontinued the CD in the process of phasing out our CD business, the material became unavailable for a period of time. We are happy to say that Provost Marshal of Charleston is again available, this time as a download.
Please CLICK HERE to read more about it and, perhaps, download a copy.
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
