30 June 2009

Archive.org has Hobart's Biographies of Hancock County


I am a big fan of Archive.org. I recently downloaded Hobart's 1908 set biographies for Hancock and Henderson Counties in Illinois. The PDF version makes for nice visuals, part of one is shown in this post.


One of the nice things that I can do on this site is a full text search. I found references to several relatives that I would not have found using only the book's index. The full text search is great. One reference was to a cousin of my great-great-grandfather who lived with another cousin of my great-great-grandfather--contained in a biography of the cousin's in-laws.
One thing I didn't notice on the site were too many old county plat books. That was what got me looking at the site initially today, until I got sidetracked.
The person shown in this image is John Habben--my great-great-grandfather.