Out of Print Books

One of the biggest problems I've come across when doing research is finding books. Many genealogical books have been out of print long enough they are nearly impossible to find, but not out of print long enough to be in the public domain yet.

The Descendants of William and Margaret McGaughey by Polly Rachel McGaughey Sutton, for example, was particularly difficult to find. After some searching, I ended up finding a copy of it on microfiche at the Oklahoma History Center in Oklahoma City. It was the closest copy I could find, and it was still a five hour drive from my house. I wanted a copy of the entire book, though, mostly because I'm crazy. However, I was only allowed to print off the parts of the book that were particularly pertinent to me because it was still protected under copyright. I got my prints, but was not satisfied. I wanted to be able to use the entire book as a reference at my leisure. I also wanted to see what was in the 1991 supplement to the original book written in 1984. I couldn't just go to Barnes and Noble and buy a copy, it's out of print! I can't download it off the internet, because it's protected under copyright and is not a very popular book. After about a month or so, I got lucky and found a copy of both books for sale on ebay for $35. Turns out, the 1991 supplement only adds some info to my patriot ancestor, William McGaughey, Jr., but none of the rest of my ancestors. It has a wealth of information on other lines, however.

The point I'm trying to make here is that this information is dastardly hard to come by. There are other genealogical books I've looked into, such as History of Pittsylvania County Virginia by Maude Carter Clement. I know, I know, there's a copy of the book available from Amazon for like 35 dollars, but I'm not really even sure what sort of information I'd be able to get from it. What if I spend the money on the book and find out there's no mention of the information I was hoping for? Even if there is some information, it seems silly to buy the entire book in hopes that there will be a page or two of information that I'm really looking for.

Campbell Chronicles and Family Sketches by Ruth Hairston Early was another book that was kind of hard to get. It has been out of print since like 1927, so it should be well within Public Domain. I even managed to find a copy of it on Google Books, but there was another problem. For whatever reason, Google would only let you preview certain pages of the book, and no downloading whatsoever! It was incredibly frustrating to know that Google took the time to digitize an out of print public domain work and then restrict access to it, particularly the one or two pages that was important to my research. I later discovered the entire book was available on Hathitrust. However, the problem here was that it was a preview only, and they wouldn't let you download the book, or so they thought. I found a little program called Hathi Download Helper, available from here, that let me download the entire book by putting in the URL to the preview. The only problem was that the resulting PDF was about a gigabyte, so I had to use another piece of software, Foxit Phantom PDF, to compress and optimize the PDF file. I finally ended up getting it down to about 70 megs, which is still large, but manageable.

There was one book by BB Paddock, that was available on the internet archive with no fuss. The only problem with that book is I probably never would have found my ancestors biography because it's a 2 volume, nearly thousand page per volume book set with no index and no table of contents. No one has taken the time to create an index for it, either. If it weren't for genealogymagazine.com having the biography of Henry Clay McGaughy on their website, I never would have known to look into BB Paddock's magnum opus.

The easiest book for me to get a hold of was A Few Barrett Kin by Emma Barrett Reeves. I just borrowed my grandpa's copy of the book and digitized it.

It's just been a bit of a frustrating journey locating information within genealogy books. I hope that other people have a better time of it than I did.