Friday in Little Rock

Not entirely random tidbits from the September 4 sessions at the Federation of Genealogical Societies conference:

* Richard Sayre on different indexes to the United States Serial Set: on Lexis/Nexis he gets 2,189 hits on "Sayre." On HeritageQuest, he gets 93. The nicest thing he could say about that discrepancy was, "There's a big filter there."

* Elizabeth Shown Mills on finding evidence of parentage in a deposition made 115 years after the child was born: "Do you carry your research down that far?"

* At the Association of Professional Genealogists' 30th anniversary luncheon, Desmond Walls Allen read extensive excerpts from her copy of the June 2030 APG Quarterly. I look forward to obtaining the confirmatory evidence 21 years from now.

* Beverly Rice on diaries and letters: "Too many people read them once, and don't read them [or transcribe them] again."

* Barbara Vines Little found the only evidence for the father of an illegitimate child in -- Baptist church minutes, where the relevant couple was "dismissed from the church for violating the seventh commandment."

Electronic but not free -- Marshall and Putnam counties, Illinois

At Wholly Genes Archive CD Books USA offers for $14.95 a download of the unindexed but now every-word-searchable book:

Ellsworth, Spencer. Records of the Olden Time; or Fifty Years on the Prairies Embracing Sketches of the Discovery, Exploration, and Settlement of the Country, the Organization of the Counties of Putnam and Marshall... Lacon, Ill. : Home Journal Steam Printing Establishment, 1880. 754 pages.

Don't bother with my summary when you can read one from Barbara Vines Little, CG.

Downloadable book$

The latest Wholly Genes newsletter includes notices of new downloadable books (PDF) for sale, including two that treat places other than New England or the mid-Atlantic:

Jacob Piatt Dunn's 1919 Indiana and Indianans: A History of Aboriginal and Territorial Indiana and the Century of Statehood. Barbara Vines Little, CG, observes, "Researchers stopping to read a particular entry are likely to find themselves completing the chapter before moving on to the next item of interest." I observe that this every-word-searchable version is noticeably less expensive than you can get the hard copy at abebooks.com.

Rev. A. B. Cristy's 1896 Cleveland Congregationalists 1895: Historical Sketches of our Twenty-Five Churches and Missions. Again, I can't find this for even twice the price as a used physical book.

(Although I am a satisfied user of Wholly Gene's bread-and-butter database product, I have no other connection with them.)