I was working for HeritageQuest when they posted the first digital books at HeritageQuestOnline. At that time, we were told that there were over 20,000 books available, but not all of them were accessible. Honestly, I can’t remember the numbers anymore. Dollarhide wrote an article for the Sept/Oct 2006 edition of the Genealogical Helper. At that time there were 20,215 digitized and searchable books on the site.
I have access to HeritageQuestOnline, since I live in Davis County, Utah. Our library system has a subscription, so I can access the database from my home, using my library card.
For the first time in months, I decided to check out the books now posted at HeritageQuest Online. Note that I’m not writing about the Census Records, PERSI, Freedman’s Bank Records, or Revolutionary War files. I counted 24,393 separate publications. That’s up over 4,000 from what was on the site when Dollarhide did his review.
Searching on the surname, Meitzler, in the Search Books/People category, I came up with 27 hits. That’s pretty good…
The following is from the Dollarhide article.
The HeritageQuest Online book collection is currently the highest-quality large digital genealogy book collection available online. Made up of familyhistories, local histories and a few primary sources, this collection was digitized from the UMI microfilm owned by ProQuest Company. Although the film had been around for years, few libraries owned the entire collection because of the high cost. Following digitization, and optical character recognition (OCR) indexing, the book collection, together with the HeritageQuest digital census images 1790—1930 formed the backbone of HeritageQuest Online.
HeritageQuest Online, unlike Ancestry.com, is available only through libraries. It is a ProQuest company product, and can be accessed at subscribing libraries or by “remote access” to those libraries, using one’s computer and library card. In many cases, entire states have HeritageQuest Online available, because of library consortia that buy for the entire state. In other cases, county, and city library systems, as well as individual libraries may have purchased the service for their patrons. Check with your local library for access.Once on the HeritageQuest Online website, click on “Search Books.” This brings you to a screen that allows two types of searches – People, and Places. The user can search for People by Name, with Place Names, and Keywords to limit the search. You can search Places by Place Name, and Persons Names, and Keywords to limit the search. A third option is available on the Search screen, and that is the Publication Browse. The user can browse the titles with bibliographical data and links to the books. These are in strict alphabetical order, not by family or place name.
Searches are easy and each of the hits is rated for relevancy. Clicking on the “View Image” button takes the user first to the title page, and then on to the hit pages within the text. Pages may then be sent to a printer or downloaded at up to fifty pages at a time.
It doesn’t get much better than this. The indexing is a little frustrating, but workable.
Another good source of free digital books is genealogybooklinks.com with it’s easy to use browse able format and Google site search.
Online history, records, biographies and family genealogy books are organized by name, subject and state. Some states such as NY, Mass, Mich, and IL are more developed then others. Massachusetts has all of the available town vital records books. Genealogy Book Links is also a good source of civil war regimental histories.
Check back often, because titles are constantly being added.