Follow Friday - Internet Archive

I was really excited when I saw a link to archive.org.  I was researching my Graves line in Massachusetts and Vermont.  I had posted a question on the Graves Family Association Facebook page and was directed to a county history book along with a link to the digitized copy.  This website is absolutely FREE. Free is my favorite word when it comes to genealogy research.  I found lots of books in PDF format regarding my areas of research.  I downloaded all of them I could find!   I check this website often to see if new content has been added that is of interest to me.  Here are the titles I have downloaded:

1673 1899 History of the town of Sunderland, Massachusetts

 Genealogies of Hadley Families Embracing the Early Settlers of the Towns of Hatfield, South Hadley, Amherst and Granby. 1862

1673 1899 History of the Town of Sunderland, Massachusetts. 1899

 Genealogy of the Graves Family in America. Three Vols. Volume I. Sketch of the Family in England. Genealogy of the Family of Thomas Graves, of Hatfield, Massachusetts. 1896  

Graves Genealogy, Traced down from Thomas Graves of Hatfield, Mass., A.D. 1645 with some English Ancestors Also Collins Genealogy As connected with the Graves family and traced down from the year 1600.  1911

 Historical Sketches of Watertown, Massachusetts...1893  

 History of Western Massachusetts, the Counties of Hampden, Hampshire, Franklin and Berkshire. 1855

 History of Hadley. Including the Early History of Hatfield, South Hadley, Amherst and Granby, Massachusetts. 1905

 1660 1910 The History of Hatfield Massachusetts. 1910

 History of the Town of Whately, Mass. Including a Narrative of Leading Events from the First Planning of Hatfield. 1660-1871. by J H Temple. 1872

Inscriptions of the Grave Stones in the Grave Yards of Northampton and of Other Towns of the Valley of the Connecticut...1850

212^th Anniversary of the Indian Attack on Hatfield, And Field-Day of the Pacumtuck Valley Memorial Association, At Hatfield, Massachusetts, Thursday, September 19^th, 1889. Gazette Printing Company, 1890. Northampton, Mass.

1673 1899 History of the Town of Sunderland, Massachusetts, Which Originally Embraced Within Its Limits the Present Towns of Montague and Leverett. By John Montague Smith. Greenfield, Mass. Press of E. A. Hall & Co. 1899

Jefferson County Prior to 1797. An address delivered at the Jefferson County Centennial in June 1905. by Robert Lansing.

Rupert, VT. Historical and Descriptive. 1761-1898 by Geo. S. Hibbard. The Tuttle Company, Printers and Publishers, Rutland. VT 

There are also US Federal Census microfilm from the Allen County Public Library that have been scanned as well.    Some of the media that has been scanned to this website are indexed the census images are not indexed.   I was fortunate to find the 1880 Census images for Linn County, Missouri!   My Louthan line settled there after the Civil War.

Play with your search terms, i.e. VT is not the same as Vermont.  You will need to search for all known abbreviations for the state you are researching, i.e. MA or Mass.  Don't get too specific or you will miss some hits.  It does take some time to go through your search results to eliminate irrelevant hits.  Only you can determine what is irrelevant to you.  Depending on the size of the PDF, I will view the pages online first to see if it has information that I need.  If it does, then I download it.  Some of these books are quite large and take some time to download on DSL.

Good luck with your search, love the hunt!