Mightier Acorns

In history and genealogy, a secondary source is a record or document created by someone who was not an eyewitness to the event, often created later using primary sources. A primary source is an original record created during the time period being researched, providing a first-hand account of an event or person.

The quality of secondary sources can vary wildly. They often do not cite their sources, but if you can find primary sources that support their claims, the biographical sketches and local histories they document can help you enhance your ancestors’ stories.

So when you find a book that seems to mention your ancestors, what do you do with it? How do you evaluate it, and what do you do with books that are out of print or hard to find?

Finding Secondary Sources

Most secondary sources that genealogy researchers might find useful fall into one of two broad categories: 1) genealogies or family histories, usually compiled by a descendant of the family in question, or 2) local histories, like those popular during the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Ancestry and FamilySearch have extensive databases of digitized books that fall into both categories. In the U.S., you can also access books through HeritageQuest online through your local public library.

Many of the books you are likely to find this way were published during the period between the Civil War and the First World War, particularly around the time of America’s first Centennial in 1876. There were several booms in publishing these types of books, driven by the economic prosperity that came after the completion of the cross-continental railroad. More people had the means to spend time and energy researching their family history, and more Americans began to take an interest in establishing their family connections back to the American Revolution or to events like the arrival of the Mayflower.

Some of this interest was spiritual, coinciding with the incorporation of genealogy into rituals of the The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Some people were also motivated by nativist and anti-immigrant sentiments, and desired to establish themselves as part of the mythology of the rugged individualist and the Pioneer. When you consider the various motivations of the people creating these books, you can’t help but see a bias towards telling the stories of the “prominent men” in the communities being researched, excluding the stories of women, freed slaves, Native American communities, or more recent arrivals who did not speak English as their native language.

Understanding that bias will help you understand what you can expect to find in these databases.

Genealogies and Surname-based Family Histories

Before the advent of the Internet, books like these served the role that many online trees serve today; and when you find them, you should approach them with the same skepticism you would apply to an online tree.

One very flawed book, The Greene family and its branches from 861 to 1904 by Lora La Mance, proved to be untrustworthy when I was trying to confirm my connection to John Greene of Rhode Island. In a post from 2024, Simple Statements of Fact, I talked about how I used that book, despite its errors, to find more trustworthy sources, such as the 1938 manuscript published by H. Porter Matteson¹ that addressed some of La Mance’s errors.

Still, with a few notable exceptions, like the La Mance book, most of these family histories were created in good faith by people who wanted to be accurate. Even if they made mistakes, it can still be useful to see what they saw. You have more resources readily available to you than they did, and you have the ability to correct those mistakes, and and even going through that process is probably faster than doing the research they had to do in the last century.

One good place to start looking for these types of books is WikiTree’s page for “Sources-Family Genealogies.” You can search through that page for your surname(s) and get an idea of what might be readily available.

Local Histories

For a long time, there was a market for “Commemorative” histories of counties throughout the American MidWest, particularly as these counties reached their local centennials. They suffer from the selection biases mentioned above, but they can still be interesting and informative. The editors of the books often got the biographies they included from surviving relatives of the subjects, which can give you some insight into the family’s opinion of itself.

For example, I strongly suspect that the biography of my 2nd-great-grandfather, John H. Callin, that appeared in the Commemorative Historical and Biographical Record of Wood County, Ohio (J. H. Beers & Co., Chicago, Illinois,1897), was written by his son, Herbert Byron Callin. He definitely exaggerated some parts of his father’s biography, and either repeated a family legend or created one when he said of John’s ancestry:

“His father, William H. Callin, was born at Callinsburg, Clarion Co., Penn., September 10, 1813…”

In fact, Callensburg, PA, was not established until 1825, and we don’t have any primary source evidence that tells us where William’s family were living when he was born. But most of the other facts Herbert recorded are supported by evidence, such as the details of John H.’s Civil War record.

Herding the Cat(egorie)s

Finding these books is an art. So is figuring out what to do with them after you find them.

In addition to the databases mentioned above, copies may be lurking in local libraries, the Library of Congress, Google Books, the Internet Archive (my favorite), the Hathi Trust… which means that the dream of finding all of these books in one place will probably never come true. (WorldCat comes close, though it is the catalog and doesn’t give direct access to the books.)

Whenever I find one of these books, I look for it on WikiTree’s page for “Sources-Family Genealogies” or (for local histories) dig down from Category:Sources. I make a point of creating a page for each book if one doesn’t already exist. (You can find a sample list of the pages I’ve built on my WikiTree profile.)

There are two main reasons I do that.

• A WikiTree page allows me to provide links to the digitized copies of that book that can exist in all of the places I just mentioned. Over time, as people add and update links, and use the page in their source citations, the usefulness of the page improves.
• A WikiTree page allows me to document problems with the reliability of a book, and help caution future readers against including its errors in their work. And, of course, adding categories and links helps search engines find the book and its associated pages, which helps future researchers.

Re-Printing and the Public Domain

Occasionally, you will find out about the existence of one of these old, out of print family history books, but it won’t be available online at all. I found this to be the case with The Berlin Family, as I mentioned in my last update, A Surfeit of Berlins. (Fortunately, I was able to make contact with the man behind that book, and we’ll be discussing our options after the holidays.)

When copies of a book are hard to come by, and the text is in the public domain, I sometimes wonder whether it would be worth re-publishing a particular book, either with a print-on-demand service like Lulu.com, or as an e-book. Most of the time, if that option is easy to do, someone has already done it. A search for the “Commemorative Historical and Biographical Record of Wood County, Ohio” through Abe Books or Alibris will give you some examples, ranging from vintage copies to re-prints.

Considering the limitations I learned about when preparing The Callin Family History for publication, I am leery of trusting re-prints that don’t give me a page count or explain why their edition is half as thick as the original.

The first challenge of re-publishing a rare book is acquiring the text in the first place, but if you are able to get it in a PDF format, the real question is, how much effort are you willing or able to put into editing? Are you going to reprint it “as is,” errors and all? Or are you going to try to fix things… and how long will that take you?

If you can find or create a digital copy of a public domain book, you’re probably better off working with one of the archive sites or a genealogical society’s library to upload it for general use.

As much as I love the idea of assembling a physical family history library of my own, the reality is that my energy is probably better served by making those WikiTree pages as good a guide to the digital copies as I can make them!

1. Matteson, H. Porter, “Mattesons in America”, Columbus, Ohio, 1938; pages 10 and 11 – accessed 12/31/2023; Provo, UT: Ancestry.com Operations Inc, 2004. ↩︎