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Free Books Online
Thanks to a grant from the Andrew C. Mellon Foundation, and work
by the University of Michigan and Cornell University, important
texts documenting American social history from 1815 through 1926 are being scanned and placed online.
The Making of America collection includes nearly a million pages of text and is free to all. You can search it by keyword, author, title or subject headings. I first wrote about this collection almost three years ago, and in that time thousands of more pages have been added—including first-person narratives, town and county histories, as well as biographical sketches.
As you know, period narratives and county histories often include juicy details that help in your ancestral search. Unfortunately, these are the volumes that are difficult to locate in all but a few libraries, and even then, they're rarely part of interlibrary loan programs because of age and condition. Now, you can search many of these volumes from the convenience of your home computer.
Better yet, along with text, many of the old books contain woodcut illustrations, such as the ones I found of various private homes, original churches, old mills, and Revolutionary War headquarters in the book about Duchess County, New York. For fun, search for period cookbooks and see what your 19th century ancestors were serving up for Thanksgiving.
All of the books and journals in this collection were scanned using optical character recognition (OCR) software, so you'll actually see the pages as they were printed. In addition, there's a pulldown View menu with choices to see the book as a PDF file or plain text. If you want to print a page for your files, it's best to view as a PDF then choose the Print option on the top menu bar. Be sure to check out the Help files, for tips on effectively searching the collection.
Note: The University of Michigan's contribution to Making of America comprises more than three million pages, including 33 recently added volumes about New York City.
Nancy Hendrickson is a contributing editor for Family Tree Magazine. She also is a family historian, freelance writer
and the author of two astronomy books. Her Web site
is at www.ancestornews.com. E-mail her at stjoemo@pobox.com.
by Nancy Hendrickson
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