Search This Blog

Monday, September 10, 2012

Finding Treasures at AbeBooks.com

I love books of all kinds but I especially love books about family history. I have a few sites that I visit to find books but I love AbeBooks.com. I have found too many books there and I usually have to pull several out of my shopping cart before I check out.

AbeBooks.com describes themselves this way:
"Launched in 1996, AbeBooks is an online marketplace where you can buy new, used, rare and out-of-print books, as well as cheap textbooks. We connect you with thousands of professional booksellers around the world and millions of books are listed for sale. Shopping on AbeBooks is easy, safe and 100% secure - search for your book, purchase a copy via our secure checkout process and the bookseller ships it straight to you." 

A recent find for me was for a little town in Brookings County, South Dakota called Sinai. I was aware there was a history book. I even had copies of of some pages that related to my family in that area. But for some reason, I still wanted to see the book. I tried to find it in libraries and online but was not having luck. Then I checked back with AbeBooks.com and one day it was there. I quickly ordered it and was not disappointed.

Paging through the book I found a large photo of my grandfather. He was listed as the coach of a local young man's baseball team in the 1935.



If you have a lot of family in one specific location, a county or town history might give you a lot of information. They can be particularly good for finding women's maiden names, where families moved from or to, or other hard-to-find information. Like all "found" information, it needs to be verified. But these local history books certainly point you in the right direction.

The Sinai History Book is new enough that it is still under copyright and not available anywhere as a free digital download. But that is something to keep in mind when you are looking for books that you are interested in. And that is a topic for another day.

No comments:

Post a Comment