If you don’t have Excel you can use Microsoft office apps online for free at http://office.live.com .

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Usage guidelines

Google is proud to partner with libraries to digitize public domain materials and make them widely accessible. Public domain books belong to the public and we are merely their custodians. Nevertheless, this work is expensive, so in order to keep providing this resource, we have taken steps to prevent abuse by commercial parties, including placing technical restrictions on automated querying.

We also ask that you:
+ Make non-commercial use of the files We designed Google Book Search for use by individuals, and we request that you use these files for personal, non-commercial purposes.
+ Refrain from automated querying Do not send automated queries of any sort to Google’s system: If you are conducting research on machine translation, optical character recognition or other areas where access to a large amount of text is helpful, please contact us. We encourage the use of public domain materials for these purposes and may be able to help.
+ Maintain attribution The Google “watermark” you see on each file is essential for informing people about this project and helping them find additional materials through Google Book Search. Please do not remove it.
+ Keep it legal Whatever your use, remember that you are responsible for ensuring that what you are doing is legal. Do not assume that just because we believe a book is in the public domain for users in the United States, that the work is also in the public domain for users in other countries. Whether a book is still in copyright varies from country to country, and we can’t offer guidance on whether any specific use of any specific book is allowed. Please do not assume that a book’s appearance in Google Book Search means it can be used in any manner anywhere in the world. Copyright infringement liability can be quite severe.

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In short, make sure it is public domain, don’t use it for commercial reasons and keep the Google “watermark”.

I normally only copy a few pages from the PDF files and here is how to do that:

Step 1: Get the PDFTK tool from http://www.accesspdf.com/pdftk/ 

This tool will let you copy only certain pages from a PDF file. It is a very powerful tool and I will only touch on one of the things it can do. For the rest of these steps, I am assuming that you have followed the download directions and have the above mentioned PDFTK tool on your computer (and you have a Public Domain book available).

Step 2: I normally put the book and the PDFTK program in the same folder. For this example I have found the book “Pioneers of old Hopewell.pdf” and I am going to extract some information about the Parke family in New Jersey.

Step 3: Identify the pages in the PDF file you need. In this case I am going to extract page 12 which contains the title and publishing information and pages 200 through 202. Here is a tricky part, the pages in the PDF file may not match the page numbering of the book. In most of the Acrobat readers there is a “pages” tab. Looking on that tab tells you what the page in the PDF file is that you are located on. In this case,  Page 200 was actually PDF page 211. Therefore we will be extracting pages 12, 211,212 and 213.

Step 4: PDFTK is a command line program so you can do all this through a Command Prompt window. I prefer to just write a small Windows Batch file and execute it. That way if I make a mistake on the page numbers I can quickly correct it and go on (or come back later and do some more).

In this case I created a file called Do_pdftk.bat in this directory and using “right-click->edit” put in the following line:

pdftk Pioneers_of_old_Hopewell.pdf  cat 12 211-213 output Pioneers_of_old_Hopewell_pp200_202.pdf

CAUTION: DO NOT name the batch file pdftk.bat or it won’t be able to find the program to run.

Lets dissect this: pdftk is the name of the utility we are using, Pioneers_of_old_Hopewell.pdf is the original book, cat 12 211-212 tells the utility to get pages 12,211,212 and 213 and output Pioneers_of_old_Hopewell_pp200_202.pdf is where to put the pages when done.

**whew**, not as hard as it looks really….

Step 5: Close the batch file editor and double click it , if everything is typed correctly it will execute (you will see a black command window come up and then go away) and you will now have another file in the directory.

Notice the new file is only a fraction of the size of the original and if you open it, it will only have the pages we listed above.

Also notice that the Google Books “watermark” is preserved.

NOTE: If it didn’t create take a look a the spelling of the command first, spaces and other special characters in filenames are typically not allowed so stick to letters, numbers and the underscore character. Also, you need to give it a new output name, if you put in the original book name it will fail. If you made a mistake on the page numbers just delete the new file, change the numbers in do_pdftk.bat and try again.

Obviously you can do a lot more with this program so keep it legal and use when you want to preserve some pages. I use the rule of thumb that if I am not willing to go and photocopy it then I won’t save it here.

Good luck.

Since then I have searched for various relatives and have found many older volumes that are on the shelves in the library that I would not have time to go through but are searchable here. For example, I have found info on relatives in:

“Virginia Historical Genealogies”

“The Battle of the Thames”

“Centennial Biography of Champaign County Ohio”

And many others.

Next post I will go through some of the lessons learned on Google books and how to carve out just relevant portions of an online book to save.

I found a link that has an index of lot of Oklahoma county court records from way back in state history. At least back to 1900 in many cases.

Oklahoma On Demand Court Records

The district court records are more recent.

The records are not detailed but I have successfully found the county that several of my ancestors were married in that I did not have before and can now apply for a copy of the marriage license from that county courthouse. It does not have the big counties (Oklahoma and Tulsa) but is very good outside that range.

In the meantime, Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!

So for Glue:

The Good: They are in glued into an album so I have access to them. I am grateful that they are available in any form.

The Bad: I can’t read the back of the photo in many cases to see what may be written there.

The Ugly: I tried plain water. It worked, after a fashion, just a few drops softened the glue and I could scrape it off (hence the ugly). The picture appears to have come through fine although I hesitate to use this technique on all the photos.

One thing, upon reading the caption on a photo that I cleaned, I found that it was not the two people that I expected it to be. Sigh…. I guess I will be **carefully* cleaning more photo backs.

PS – If you know how to safely remove glued on cardboard from the backs of photos, please let me know.

1. So-and-So, ancestor,  is full-blooded indian.  FICTION – This was a case of just looking at the names on the indian roll and assuming that the same-name meant the same-person.

2. So-and-So, ancestor, killed someone and fled to another state changing their identity. POSSIBLE but not proven. Some mysterious facts have changed on a couple of ancestors at particular times (such as place of birth, age, etc)

3. So-and-So, ancestor, was buried in a cave with treasure. FACT – if by treasure you mean several Demijohns of Peach Brandy. John Wilson was buried in Wilson cave in Miller county, Missouri in 1856 with Peach Brandy that he wanted his friends to come back in 7 years and drink. Unfortunately, vandals had broken into the cave and stolen the brandy before the 7 years were up.

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