Tech Tuesday - HathiTrust Digital Library

   While searching for source information about the "Wisconsin Helper" on a research note in my Gill family folders, I was directed by WorldCat to HathiTrust Digital Library.
   That was a new one for me.
   I found that the "Wisconsin Helper" had been digitized and could be searched, but was not available for full view because of the copyright.

   I was curious! What was this library? A news release from Indiana University had a brief history of the trust.

"The HathiTrust was created in 2008 through a partnership with the 12-university consortium known as the Committee on Institutional Cooperation (CIC), the 11 university libraries of the University of California system and the University of Virginia. Since that time HathiTrust has grown to encompass the research libraries of more than 50 institutions. HathiTrust was built to enable libraries a means to archive and provide access to their digital content, whether scanned volumes, special collections or born-digital materials. Preserving materials for the long term has long been a mission and driving force of leading research libraries. Their collections, accumulated over centuries, represent a treasury of cultural heritage and investment in the broad public good of promoting scholarship and advancing knowledge. The representation of these resources in digital form provides expanded opportunities for innovative use in research, teaching and learning, but must be done with careful attention to effective solutions for the curation and long-term preservation of digital assets."

   Statistics on the home page says the trust holds 8,577,950 total volumes, 4,701,131 book titles, 209,874 serial titles amounting to 3,002,282,500 pages and 384 terabytes. And only three years old.

   Even though I'm not supposed to be doing research right now (you remember the "I've GOT to get organized" project), I had to give the library a spin.
   You can do a Catalog Search, or a Full Text Search or set up your own Collection. I didn't want to take the time to try setting up a collection, so I decided to dive in to a full-text search. As I discovered a bit later, there is an advanced search for the catalog but not for full text (coming in the future).
   Hmmm. OK.

    Gill. Search is very fast. Returned 880,669 hits, 263,073 in items available for full view. A few too many to look through in . . . what . . . two years.
   William Gill. -- 707,645 total, 229,770 full view. Default must be AND or I'd have gotten more hits.
   "William Gill" -- in quotes -- 6,872 total, 3,421 full view. Still too many.
   "William Gill" & "New Brunswick" -- no good -- use AND or OR or a minus sign (-) to remove words as search terms.
   "William Gill" AND "New Brunswick" -- 2,610 total, 1,266 full view.
   "William Gill" AND "New Brunswick" AND Brockway -- 719 total, 250 full view. I might wade through those some day. Maybe add "-Jersey" to eliminate New Brunswick, New Jersey.
   One more: "William Gill" AND "New Brunswick" AND "Anna Brockway" -- 5 total, 1 full view.

   That's drilling down. 
   The full view was from New Jersey so no help, but one of the "search-only" books I had to find -- Early families of "the Mackadavy" : settlers before, during, and following the Loyalist period, Magaguadavic Valley, Parish of St. George, Southwestern New Brunswick, Canada. Two clicks took me back to WorldCat which told me the closest library owning the book was Allen County -- 210 miles away.
   OK. I'll buy it. It was published in 2004 so it should be available. Well, maybe. Amazon didn't have it. A Google search found one website that said it's out of print and another that said it was $35. The latter site had the author's email address so I fired off an email for clarification. Email bounced. No such address. Not a good sign. This will require some additional research.

   Pages from full-view books can be read on the HathiTrust website. The PDFs also can be downloaded if you are on the domain of a partner institution. Alternatives are to check Google Books, Internet Archive or elsewhere for a downloadable PDF.
   HathiTrust has been added to my Google bookmarks.

I've GOT to get organized -- Update

   Progress has been very slow. I've been revisiting the Brockway folders, entering all the notes into the List of Sources Searched.
   The last two folders contained ancient correspondence. Some of you might remember hand-written letters, carbon copies of typewritten letters, hand-printed pedigree charts and family group sheets.  (How did we survive not getting a response for three weeks or three months?)
    Just to prove that this disorganization I'm fighting is nothing new, I quote from a letter I wrote on April 6, 1986 -- just a few days over 25 years ago. I quote:

"I'm about to go berserk here. Some of my notes on this problem are missing from where they should be in my files. (I think I had them out when I wrote to you 2 March and apparently I didn't put them away.) One of these days I'm going to give up all my other responsibilities and get my genealogy in order.  I promise!"

   It's taken 25 years, but a promise is a promise.

Sunday's Obituary - Fred A. Brockway

   I'm not sure how I came to have these two obituaries of Fred A. Brockway. I have no record of him in my RootsMagic, but then there is a lot of data on my paper family group sheets for the Brockway family that has never been entered into the computer. Several Ancestry Trees indicate this Fred A. Brockway is the son of Andrew S. and Jennie A. (Bristol) Brockway. If the ancestral lines are correct, there is a good chance he is a distant cousin.

B-2
The State Journal [Lansing, Michigan]
Sun., Aug 19, 1979

BROCKWAY, FRED A.
2815 Northwind Dr.
East Lansing
Formerly of Flint and Harrison

Mr. Brockway, age 94, died at a local hospital Aug. 17, 1979. He had been a resident of the Lansing area for 4½ years coming from Harrison. He was a Life Member of Flint Lodge No. 23, F. & A. M.; Life Member of Elf Khurafeh Temple of Saginaw, member of the Genessee Valley Commandry No. 5, K. T. and a member of Kishma Grotto No. 77. Surviving are: 1 sister, Leila B. Thompson of Lansing;; 3 nieces, Mrs. Betty Bissell of St. Augustine, Fla., Mrs. Joan Andrews and Mrs. Marilyn Johnson, both of Lansing; 2 nephews, Paul Collier of Harrison and Tyrus Poxson of Creed, Colo. Holt Lodge No. 572, F. & A. M. will provide the service at 1:00 P.M. Monday in the Estes-Leadley Holt Chapel, with interment in North Cemetery. Pall Bearers will be provided by Holt Lodge No. 572, F. & A. M.













Towne Courier [East Lansing, Michigan]
Vol. 18 No. 33
Page 5A   August 22, 1979

Fred Brockway, 94
   Fred A. Brockway, 94, of 2815 Northwind Drive, East Lansing, died Friday, Aug. 17, at a local hospital. He had been a resident of the Lansing area for four years coming from Harrison.
   Mr. Brockway was a life member of Flint Lodge No. 23, F&AM; a life member of Elf Khurafeh Temple of Saginaw, and a member of the Genessee Valley Commandry No. 5, K.T. and Kishma Grotto No. 77.
   Surviving are his sister, Leila B. Thompson of Lansing; three nieces and two nephews.
   Services were conducted Monday, Aug. 20, in the Estes-Leadley Holt Chapel with the Holt Lodge No. 572 F&AM officiating. Burial was in North Cemetery.

Funeral Card Friday - William H. Bowen

    "A precious one from us has gone, . . . "   Gone but not forgotten was William Henry Bowen, my great granduncle, who was born 15 March 1860 in Vermilion Co., Illinois, and died 12 December 1908 in Oakwood Township, Vermilion Co.
   This funeral card printed in gold ink is among the pictures and memorabilia my mother pasted onto the pages of her "ancestor albums."

Josephine Bowen

   My connection to the Bowen family is through William Bowen's wife, Josephine Carrigan, who was born 28 June 1867 in Georgetown, Vermilion Co., Illinois, and died 28 May 1932 in Danville, Vermilion Co. She was the daughter of Henry and Lucretia (Savage) Carrigan. Josephine and William Bowen were married 1 Mar 1888 in Vermilion County.

   William and Josephine Bowen had three children -- Oscar, born 17 January 1889; Goldie L., born 2 October 1890; and Fred Leo, born 23 May 1895. All were born in Oakwood Township, in or near the community of Fithian.
   William and Josephine are buried in Stearns Cemetery in Oakwood Township.

Cemetery Preservation Workshop

   Cemetery preservation will be the topic for the "Second Saturday" workshop April 9 sponsored by the Kentucky Historical Society and the Kentucky Genealogical Society.
   Doors open at 10 a.m. at the Clark Center for Kentucky History in downtown Frankfort, Kentucky, and the program begins at 10:30.

   Speakers will be Ann Johnson, KHS cemetery preservation program coordinator, and Phil DiBlasi, staff archaeologist at the University of Louisville.
   Johnson will discuss KHS resources available to family historians and cemetery preservationists and DiBlasi will discuss the use of GPS to document cemeteries.
   A visit to Frankfort Cemetery is planned as part of the workshop to demonstrate stone cleaning and the use of GPS.

   The Kentucky Technology in Genealogy Users Group meets at the close of each Second Saturday workshop with a talk or discussion of a technology topic of interest to historians and genealogists.
   The workshop is free and open to the public. An optional box lunch is available for $6, payable at the door.
   To reserve a lunch, contact the KHS library reference desk by calling 502-564-1792 or by email before noon on Friday, April 8.
   The Clark Center for Kentucky History is at the corner of Ann Street and West Broadway in Frankfort. There's free parking in the lot across West Broadway.

   The library is open until 5 p.m. on Saturdays so it's a good opportunity to come to the workshop and to get in a little research after it's over.
   You'll usually find me behind the counter taking registrations at the workshop, so please say "Hi".

Sorting Saturday - I've GOT to get organized - week 3

   This will probably be my last post on this topic . . . at least for a while.
   Work is progressing and I've taken to heart the suggestions about not throwing unsourced notes away but keeping them as clues. Since I'm making the effort to have all notes entered in my LSS (List of Sources Searched), that frees up the manila folders to house the clues.
   I suspect I'll have a lot of "clues" once I get into the notes I inherited from my mother. My mother spent a lot of time talking to her cousins and gathering pictures from them, but she was not as careful at recording the source of the information as I tried to be. (I try to scan a few of the pictures in her "ancestor albums" every day.)

   The Carrigan folders have had my attention the last couple of days. I have more notes on this family (my maternal grandmother's) than almost any other.
   In the process, I ran into newspaper clippings -- mostly obituaries. Some were loose in the file folders. Some were taped or stapled to letter-sized paper.
   I realized the first order of business would be to gently remove them from whatever they were attached to, scan them and make a printout of the scan to go in the notes folder. But then what?

   Throw the originals away? No, I didn't even consider that.
   What I finally decided to do, but I'm hoping to get suggestions from you on this, is to put them in a sheet protector, cut the protector down to letter size (cutting off the edge punched to go in a binder) and then stapling the protector holding the clipping to the printout. I don't think the clipping will fall out and the original will follow the printout from green folder to blue folder when the data is entered into my RootsMagic.
   If I had family binders as DearMyrtle recommends, I'd put them in there. But I don't.
   Suggestions?