Before you buy a genealogy book, check here

[Rosie1223]

https://books.familysearch.org/primo_library/libweb/action/search.do?vid=FHD_PUBLIC

I found a free pdf version of a book I recently purchased.

[kdmorris]

1. Ohhh thank you!!!

If you don't mind, I'm going to add this to the thread of links pinned at the top.

[csziggy]

2. A lot of the old genealogies, family histories and local history books are at Archive.org

The Internet Archive. Some are available free from Google Books, too.

A suggestion if you find one at Archive.org - download the PDF scan of the original AND the plain text HTML page. Their PDFs are nor OCR'd and not searchable. The plain text is searchable but the OCR is not great. I use the HTML page to search, then verify the information from the PDF copy. And if I'm making hard copies for my Mom, I print the original page from the PDF.

I also save their catalog page for the book so I have all the bibliographic information for the source.

[The Genealogist]

3. There is one I use for the Hochstetler family, that is quite good

It was put together sometime around 1910, but I have found it to be quite accurate, in comparing the information in it to other existing records. I am not sure how they get the info they got to make the book, but my direct ancestors (including my grandfather) are listed in the book, and quite accurately. Other lines of mine are included in other books as well, available for free on Google books and similar sites.

[csziggy]

4. Many of the old researchers went to the locations and actually looked at old records

Which is invaluable because a lot of those records have degraded in the hundred years or so since those books were written.

What I love is that books my mother never had access to or had to wait ages to get through interlibrary loans or had to go to Washington to the DAR library are now available free on the internet. Some of the books she used for reference and only got to see once, I've found additional information that she missed when she used them. Others she never got to check and I've found more info in them.