Newton MA Blue Book for 1910

The Newton MA Blue Book for 1910 is an important piece of social history (and history of Boston “Society”) that we are delighted to bring back into our catalog.  Originally published on CD-ROM, it has been unavailable since we discontinued our CD line, but now we have taken the original material from the CD and made it available as a download — at a substantial savings, by the way.

In case you wondered what communities are included in the Newton MA Blue Book for 1910, here’s the list:  Thompsonville, Newton Upper Falls, Newton Highlands, Newton Lower Falls, Chestnut Hill, Waban Hill, Newton, Newton Centre, Newtonville, Nonantum, West Newton, Waban, Reeds Corner, and Auburndale.  Today — and doubtless in 1910 — residents frequently would say where they lived according to the small community — e.g. Waban — rather than the more inclusive Newton.  In case you’re trying to correlate any of these to today’s locations, the Blue Book contains a large and detailed map of all of Newton as well.

Since the Blue Book is first and foremost a directory, it has the predictable names and addresses of the residents — with some additional touches, such as summer addresses for those who went to the ocean in the summer (a bit like the Social Register).

The ads are fascinating.  You’ll find the usual trades, but you will also see ads for riding stables and private schools, as well as seating maps of the major theatres of Boston — and you’ll not find that in many other municipal directories of the era!

If this sounds interesting, you can CLICK HERE to go directly to the Newton MA Blue Book for 1910 page on our website to learn more.  There we have a list of the surnames included, in case you would like to check further.  We would be remiss if we failed to mention our catalog as well.  Who knows what you might find there!

Newton MA Blue Book for 1910

 

Worcester MA Directory for 1871

We’re very happy to announce the republication of Howland’s Directory of Worcester, MA for 1871, this time as a download.

A few years ago we made this rarity available on CD-ROM, but when we discontinued our line of CDs, it became — as far as we know — unavailable except as a rare book.  Now we are catching up on making material that was previously on our CDs available as downloads, and today Howland’s Worcester MA Directory for 1871 came up.

We are aware that Ancestry.com does offer lookups in this directory, but we are unaware of any other online sources for this 405 page volume.  While lookups are certainly useful, we think that having the “real thing” at hand offers many advantages that you don’t get with a download.

At any rate, you can read more about this volume, and, if you feel inclined, you can buy it via download if you go to our page about the Worcester MA Directory for 1871.

Worcester MA Directory for 1871

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.

Recovering history
Between the Lakes Group helps you recover history!

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.