Looking for a free resource for old books and publications about your family
Look no further....
Right now I am trying to find a digital copy of my ancestors book, “My Butler Family” which was published many moons ago and has gone out of print. I have a lot of the excerpts I need but I want a full copy to read over and see if any clues were missed. Finding old books can be done on paid sites but as you know, if you read my columns, I am a cheap old geezer who believes family histories should not be behind a pay wall. Especially when you have to pay and half the time the information you thought they had turns out to be another red herring.
Well, here is an awesome site with original digital copies you can review for free with a quick search.
HathiTrust Digital Library – Millions of books online
Over 18 million searchable books and publications all online for you to do research in. Be still my beating heart!
You will see that HathiTrust will let libraries and organizations join but not individuals. Why because they get to use the service for free.
This is a growing, active resource for the genealogist and should not be overlooked. My experience with the search engine did not yet yield the book I want but it did return hundreds of other documents I need to look at.
I hope that this site helps you in your search for your family.
Haha Saphyre thank you for the comment! Man you are giving away my future content. Now I got to start thinking of new content again, haha! Just kidding. I use those as well, I had never heard of the one I talked about today, so it got a mention. Old dogs can learn new tricks and thanks to the internet we can bore young people with them.
Take a look at archive.org and google books. Both have 1000s of old histories and genealogies. I found a picture of my grandfather in an old school yearbook as well as so much more on archive. Google has so far been a secondary source but there are more books there every day.