This is a great online tool! It is not fancy, but you will want to bookmark it. Mollie Lynch of Clarkston, Michigan, is a retired librarian who decided to assist people wishing to find genealogy books. She knew that thousands of American biographies, genealogies and history books have been digitized and made available on the Internet, usually free of charge. However, there was no single resource of "what is available and where." Mollie decided to create that resource. (Click "Read More")
Mollie's web site, GenealogyBookLinks.com, provides links to freely available digital books, focusing on American biographies, genealogies, and history books. The site now contains more than 30,000 links from more than 35 sources (Only the top sources are listed on the site, but all are accessible from her site.). New books are being added to the list daily. The current focus is on surnames, directories, vital records, and identifying smaller sites with local area-specific books.
Using the Genealogy Book Links web site is simple: you either scroll through the list of available books or else use the site's search capability to find a surname or location of interest. Once you find something that looks interesting, click on the link and you are taken to where the book is stored on another web site. You can easily “stroll through the stacks” in about the same manner as any other library, or go down the list of available books in whatever topic you wish and click on anything that looks interesting. A few seconds later you are “thumbing” through the pages of the book of interest.
I was pleasantly surprised when I did a search for my own surname and found a number of books available, including one I had not seen before. A few seconds later, I was reading that book. It worked quickly and easily, all at no charge. The links lead to such sites as Google Books, The Internet Archive, Brigham Young University's e-books, OpenLibrary.org, many university libraries, as well as to several other major and lesser-known online libraries of digital books.
Mollie Lynch often describes herself as a "retired librarian," but I don't think she is retired at all. In fact, it looks to me like she is now helping more people than ever!
Presently GenealogyBookLinks.com focuses solely on American biographies, genealogies, and history books. However, as the years go by, I expect that we will see similar resources for thousands of other topics, thereby creating true digital libraries of books of all topics.
To use Mollie Lynch's GenealogyBookLinks.com, go to http://genealogybooklinks.com.
Information in this article was provided with permission from Richard (Dick) Eastman's Blog
Using the Genealogy Book Links web site is simple: you either scroll through the list of available books or else use the site's search capability to find a surname or location of interest. Once you find something that looks interesting, click on the link and you are taken to where the book is stored on another web site. You can easily “stroll through the stacks” in about the same manner as any other library, or go down the list of available books in whatever topic you wish and click on anything that looks interesting. A few seconds later you are “thumbing” through the pages of the book of interest.
I was pleasantly surprised when I did a search for my own surname and found a number of books available, including one I had not seen before. A few seconds later, I was reading that book. It worked quickly and easily, all at no charge. The links lead to such sites as Google Books, The Internet Archive, Brigham Young University's e-books, OpenLibrary.org, many university libraries, as well as to several other major and lesser-known online libraries of digital books.
Mollie Lynch often describes herself as a "retired librarian," but I don't think she is retired at all. In fact, it looks to me like she is now helping more people than ever!
Presently GenealogyBookLinks.com focuses solely on American biographies, genealogies, and history books. However, as the years go by, I expect that we will see similar resources for thousands of other topics, thereby creating true digital libraries of books of all topics.
To use Mollie Lynch's GenealogyBookLinks.com, go to http://genealogybooklinks.com.
Information in this article was provided with permission from Richard (Dick) Eastman's Blog
