Google Books

Those of you who have not yet discovered Google Books, I'm here to tell you that you should!    Just looking around, as I often do, on the internet and had heard a mention of Google Books in the past so thought I'd try it.    First I typed 'Berry Genealogy' into the Google search bar and selected 'Books'.    If 'Books' is not showing as a selection you may have to click the 'More >>' above the search bar to find it.    You will then be presented with a list of books containing your search term, some offering a 'snippet view', some a 'limited preview' and some a 'full view'.


In addition, you will notice under the search box you are now offered the opportunity to search for 'All books' or 'Full view books'.    Well, because my experience has always been that the particular page I was interested in was 'not available', I opted to limit my search to 'Full view books'.

I don't know whether there are full view books available for other reasons or not, but Google has undertaken a project to partner with libraries to digitize public domain materials and make them widely accessible.    A public domain book is one that was never subject to copyright or whose legal copyright term has expired.

I decided to search 'Full view books' for "Thomas Berry", a pretty common name in many lines.    As serendipity would have it, my first offering shown was History of the Town of Rye, New Hampshire: from its discovery and settlement to December 31, 1903 - Page 305.    Well, I've been interested for a little while now in researching the 'Strawberry Bank Berrys' and have started a very small 20 person database from internet sources.

Now, thanks to Google Books, I have on my desktop a downloaded .pdf copy of all 675 pages of History of the Town of Rye, New Hampshire: from its discovery and settlement to December 31, 1903 by Langdon B. Parsons which I expect to help a lot in that particular research project.

Take a look.    You, too, may find a jewel.