FAMILY HISTORY BOOKS ONLINE
©2009 by Donald R. Snow
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This page was last updated 2009-07-11.
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WELCOME AND INTRODUCTION TO CLASS
- Instructors are Donald R. and Diane M. Snow
(snowd@math.byu.edu , dms34@juno.com ) of Provo and St.
George, Utah
- These notes with active Internet links are posted on
the Utah Valley PAF Users Group website http://uvpafug.org under
Class Outlines ,
Don's Listings . Many other class
notes for family history are linked on both sites also.
- Note: holding down the Ctrl key while clicking on a link in these notes will open the link in a new window so you can keep these notes open in the original window. Open the new window to see the new website.
- There are many full-text family history books posted on the Internet, as well as parts of others. These notes give information on finding and using some of these.
PORTABLE DOCUMENT FORMAT (PDF) AND USING THE DATA FOUND
- Most online books are in PDF (Portable Document Format) which was developed by Adobe and can be read with the free Adobe Reader downloadable from http://get.adobe.com/reader/
- There are two forms of PDF with text:
- Regular PDF -- generated by a word processing program like Word or WordPerfect and with the file saved as a PDF
- This is the style the LDS Church uses for things like the Ensign magazine, Priesthood/Relief Society manuals, etc.
- Can copy and paste lines, paragraphs, pages, or the entire book to include in a genealogy program such as PAF
- Scanned PDF -- this is a picture of a printed page and was not generated from text directly
- This is what you get from your flatbed scanner.
- Can copy parts or all of these as images and paste into PAF in mulitmedia and/or source images, but not as text into Notes.
- To convert this type to a text file you need an OCR (Optical Character Recognition) program
- Your scanner may have come with one - read the manual
- SimpleOCR is a freeware OCR program from http://www.simpleocr.com/ -- not very accurate, but free
- FastStone Capture -- excellent freeware screen capture program (last freeware version is 5.3 - later versions cost money) -- available from http://www.oldapps.com/fast_stone_capture.php
- Allows copying any part of the PDF into various graphics formats including jpg's, tif's, and even PDF's
- If you want more than just the image, you must OCR the clip into a text file
- Illustrations of using PDF data in PAF
FAMILYSEARCH AND FAMILY HISTORY LIBRARY CATALOG
- The Family History Library Catalog (FHLC) on FamilySearch.org is now listing FH
books which have been digitized from their collection and other collections. These are posted online in Brigham Young University's Family History Archives
- For such digitized volumes the FHLC has the words written in red: "To view
a digital version of this book click here." and clicking on "Here" takes you to the
entire digitized book posted on the BYU Harold B. Lee Library web site
(see next paragraph)
- Examples
- Several thousand volumes are online so far -- to find all such in the FHLC, see the next paragraph
- To be digitized and posted volumes must be out of copyright or the copyright holder must have given permission.
- http://www.familysearch.org/ under Search Records > Historical Books -- leads to Brigham Young University's Harold B. Lee Family History Archives online collection
BYU'S HAROLD B. LEE LIBRARY ONLINE COLLECTIONS
- The Family History Library in Salt Lake City is working with the Brigham Young University's Harold B. Lee Library to digitize and post online the FH volumes from the FHL, the Allen County (Fort Wayne Indiana) FH Library, and several others.
- BYU Family History Archives -- http://www.lib.byu.edu/fhc/ (Same website as from FamilySearch.org > Search Records > Historical Books)
- These digitized volumes are PDF (Portable Document Format) and are completely searchable for any names or words in the entire text.
- Click on Advanced Search or
http://contentdm.lib.byu.edu/cdm4/search.php
for more detailed searches and to see the kinds of digitized records they have.
- In Advanced Search you can search all the online books or only particular collections, e.g. the Family Histories collections, by going to the lower pane and selecting, for example, Family Histories 1, Family Histories 22 - Fort Wayne, etc.
- Each set of Family Histories has several hundred volumes
- Click to move the selected set over to the right pane
- For estimates on how many volumes are in each Family History set do an advanced search on each set
for something like "." (without the quotes) that would occur in all volumes -- Family Histories 1 has at least 700 volumes, Family Histories 2 has at least 260 volumes, etc.
- For each of these titles the FHLC has the note in red: "To view a digital version of this book click here."
- This gives a way to find all such digitized volumes in the FHLC.
- BYU Library has many online digital collections, including photographs -- see
http://www.lib.byu.edu/online.html
GOOGLE BOOKS
- Google has signed contracts with many large libraries to digitize millions of books and post them online -- includes both full-text and partial text postings
- Most are already out of copyright, but they have permission to post some that are still in copyright
- Go to http://books.google.com/ or from
http://www.google.com click on More, then Book Search.
- To do a search in all their volumes for a complete name enter the name in quotes, e.g. “Brigham Young”, or go to the Advanced Search screen and enter it in the "Exact Phrase" field
- To search only those volumes that are full-text go to the Advanced Book Search and set it to search only Full View texts
- Your term shows up highlighted in yellow on the pages in each of the digitized books.
- Where Google doesn't have permission to post the entire volume you only see a snippet of the page with the search term highlighted and information on where you can see or purchase the volume.
- For most of the full-text books you can usually download the entire volume or just the pages you want, all in PDF form
- Most Google full-text books seem to have a button to click to show it in printable text format -- can then copy and paste any ines or paragraphs you want
OTHER ONLINE FAMILY HISTORY BOOKS
- Articles and search engines about full-text books online
- A few websites and book digitizing projects are the following.
- Heritage Quest Online – http://www.eogen.com/HeritageQuestOnline –
article about HQO from Encyclopedia of Genealogy
- Has 25,000 FH books, U.S. Censuses, Revolutionay War Records, PERSI (Periodical Source Index), etc.
- Requires a library card from a library with a subscription to access it from home -- see
partial list of libraries in the Encyclopedia article
- Provo, Orem, Washington County, and other Utah libraries give you free access from home with your local library card
- Open Library -- http://openlibrary.org/ -- 23 million books with 1 million full-text books
- Project Gutenberg -- http://www.gutenberg.org/catalog/
- Internet Archive -- http://www.archive.org/index.php
- Virtual Reference Shelf by the Library of Congress -- http://www.loc.gov/rr/askalib/virtualref.html
- University of Texas -- http://www.lib.utexas.edu/books/etext.html
- University of Pennsylvania Library -- http://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/
- Internet Public Library -- http://www.ipl.org/
- Free History and Genealogy Books Online -- http://www.genealogysearch.org/free/digitalpublications.html
- List of 40 ebook websites --
http://education-portal.com/articles/40_Places_for_College_Students_to_Find_Free_Unabridged_Books_Online.html
- DjVu Books -- http://www.djvuzone.org/demos/appli/index.html
- FullBooks -- http://www.fullbooks.com/
- Australia and the South Pacific -- http://www.e-book.com.au/freebooks.htm
- World E-Book Fair -- http://worldebookfair.com/Collections.htm
- DiplomaGuide.com -- http://diplomaguide.com/articles/List_of_Online_Archives_for_Free_Unabridged_Books_Online.html
- ReadPrint - Free Online Library -- http://www.readprint.com/
- Forgotten Books Online -- http://www.forgottenbooks.org
- e-Books Directory -- http://e-booksdirectory.com/ -- many good PDF format text, math, science, and other books
- Electronic Texts list -- http://www.svrc.vic.edu.au/etexts.html -- from Statewide Vision Resource Centre, Melbourne, Australia
- To find many other websites type
something like “free online full-text books genealogy” (without the quotes)
into a search engine like
http://www.google.com
or
http://www.clusty.com
ASSIGNMENT
- Go to Google Books and see if you can find a volume containing the name of one of your ancestors. Or use "Erastus Snow".
- Go to one of the websites and find a book that contains information on a place some of your ancestors lived, e.g. Marylebone, Middlesex.
- Do a Google or other search for "free full-text books online" (without the quotes) and see the list of websites that comes up.
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