Internet Archive

DON'S FREEWARE CORNER - MAR 2022

LDS GENEALOGY BOOKS ONLINE: PART 1

 ©2022 Donald R. Snow -- This page last updated 2022-03-08 =============================================
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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LDS GENEALOGY BOOKS ONLINE: PART 1

There are many websites with free genealogy books online.  Here are the URLs of a few of them.

FamilySearch Digital Library

-- https://www.familysearch.org/library/books

Internet Archive

-- https://archive.org/details/texts

Google Books

-- https://books.google.com/ -- you can form a Google Library collection

HathiTrust

-- https://www.hathitrust.org -- you form a HathiTrust collection of your favorites on their website

Online books are usually in pdf (Portable Document Format) which are pictures of the pages.  The pdf page numbers may be different than the book page numbers since the pdf pages include the covers, title and front pages, etc.  However, the original page numbers will be on each book page as in the original book.  Some books are only available online to search, but not download, so you find what you want and then do screenshots.  For pdfs on your own computer, these are pictures of the book pages and, hence, may not be searchable unless they are OCRd (Optical Character Recognized) with a program that recognizes the characters as words. Such OCR programs form the text layer that goes over the picture layer and makes them searchable.  There are several good OCR programs that are free and I have written articles and notes about some of them in the past. 

SOME LDS GENEALOGY BOOKS ONLINE

Pioneers and Prominent Men of Utah by Frank Esshom

-- https://archive.org/details/pioneersprominen00esshrich

Scandinavian Jubilee Album

-- https://archive.org/search.php?query=title%3A%28%22Scandinavian%20Jubilee%20Album%22%29

Church Chronology by Andrew Jenson

-- https://archive.org/details/churchchronology1914jens

A Century of Mormon Activity in California by Leo J. Muir

-- https://www.familysearch.org/library/books/viewer/484284/?offset=&return=1#page=1&viewer=picture&o=&n=0&q=

ABOUT THESE BOOKS

Pioneers and Prominent Men of Utah by Frank Esshom was published in 1913 and has about 1400 pages. It was an effort to have articles and pictures about prominent people, mostly men, in Utah. Used hard copies are available in some used bookssotres but cost a lot and the entire book has been pdfd and is available online to download for free. Once downloaded to your computer, you can search it for any word and do screenshots of any parts you want.  Here's a screenshot of part of Page 52 with some of my Snow ancestors.  

https://uvtagg.org
Screenshot of Part of Page 52 of Pioneers and Prominent Men of Utah


The Scandinavian Jubilee Album was published in 1900 as a Jubilee celebration of the founding of the Scandinavian Missions of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints by Eratus Snow. Hard copies are hard to find, but the entire pdf is available at several places to download and use. It contains articles and pictures of many of the early Church members from Denmark, Sweden, Norway, and Finland. The downloaded pdf is completely searchable so you can find what you are looking for.

Church Chronology by Andrew Jenson is a day-by-day list of what the Church was doing since its founding and, hence, it mentions all the pioneer companies, missiories being sent out in the early days, and so on. You may find information in it about an ancestor tht you weren't aware of what he or she did. Hard copies are available in used bookstores, but the downloadable pdf is evry-word searhable and is easier to use. Andrew Jenson ws the Assistant Church Historian for many years.  He was from Denmark so his name was originally spelled Jensen, but he changed it to Jenson.

A Century of Mormon Activity in California by Leo J. Muir was published in 1952 and is in two volumes with Volume 2 being entirely biographical of Church members in Southern and Northern California.  It has articles and pictures of many families, including my Dad's family, so it has a  picture of me in it.  It is still in copyright, so you can't download the entire book, but you can search it online and do screenshots of any pages you want. Hard copies are still available in used bookstores, but the online pdf is easier to use.

CONCLUSIONS

There is a wealth of online genealogy books online and many inlcude much information about members of the Church of Jesus Christ. The four books memtioned here are just a start and other articles will include additional such books.
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