DON'S FREEWARE CORNER - JAN 2022
GENEALOGY BOOKS ON HERITAGEQUEST ONLINE AND HATHITRUST
©2022 Donald R. Snow
-- This page last updated 2022-01-03
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These Freeware Corner notes are published in TAGGology, our Utah
Valley Technology and Genealogy Group (UVTAGG) monthly
newsletter. They are also posted on my Freeware Corner
Notes page on http://uvtagg.org/classes/dons/dons-classes.html
where the links are active and there may be corrections, updates,
and additional information here and in other class notes.
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GENEALOGY BOOKS ON HERITAGEQUEST ONLINE AND HATHITRUST
©2022 Donald R. Snow
GENEALOGY BOOK WEBSITES
There are many free online sources of family history books,
the major ones being FamilySearch, Google Books, and Internet
Archive. A website with links and descriptions to these
and many others is http://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/archives.html .
This Freeware Corner article discusses two little-used online book sources,
HeritageQuest Online and the HathiTrust. Other class and
Freeware Corner notes and articles have more information about these and
related websites.
HERITAGEQUEST ONLINE
This is a website that you can get to with the bar code of your
public library card. Many public libraries have access to
this through their own websites and, in Utah, you can go
to https://onlinelibrary.utah.gov/heritagequest-online/ and type in your public library bar code to get to it.
Once in HQO, click on Search Books to get to their 28,000 family
and local history books.
EXAMPLES FROM HERITAGEQUEST ONLINE
Search for "births" in "Woburn Massachusetts" (without the
quotes) to see the several volume set of compiled vital
records from the town of Woburn, MA. It can be searched
for any names and you can download or print the pages
you want. This particular series of books is sometimes
referred to as "The Yellow Peril" series since one
edition of it has yellow covers. The state of
Massachusetts gave grants to several hundred MA towns
to compile all their town vital records up to 1850 and
this book series is the result. These are compiled vital
records, so you might want to also check the originals
for your ancestors.
Here is a screenshot from these books.
Screenshot of Woburn Massachusetts Vital Records from
HeritageQuest Online
HQO has hundreds of local histories of states, towns, counties,
churches, and areas. Many local histories have genealogy sections
that give information about people that lived there. Here is
an example from HQO.
Screenshot of History of Middlesex County Massachusetts from
HeritageQuest Online
HeritageQuest Online is available to you for free with
your public library card bar code and is worth checking.
HATHITRUST
This s a partnership with academic and research institutions with website https://www.hathitrust.org/ . It contains 3 million free every-word searchable books. Searching for "genealogy" (without the quotes)
brings up over 300,00 full-text books that contain that word.
Searching for "Eldon Snow" (with the quotes) brings up many
books with my Dad's name in them. Not all of them refer to
my Dad, but as usual, there are several books that do mention my Dad that I have never seen before. Here's a scrrenshot of HathiTrust/ .
Screenshot of Top Part of Results For "Eldon Snow" on HathiTrust
The website has good search syntax (ways to search) and this is explained in the Search Tips section. You can use quote
marks to find exact phrases, do Boolean searches (AND, OR, NOT), and use wild cards. The Search Tips section also shows how to read
and use the resulting hits. You can view and/or download their books in various ways or just look at plain text from their OCR (Optical
Character Recognition), but that may not always be accurate. This site is very helpful and will get a separate Freeware
Corner article in the future.
CONCLUSIONS
There are many books of genealogy and genealogy-related information
online and many are completely free and searchable. We
sometimes only think of the two or three major websites, but
there are many more and this article has described two of the
little-used ones, HeritgeQuest Online and HathiTrust. You
might find something on these that's not on the larger websites.
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