I wrote about Cornell University’s online digital history collection in the 9 October 1999 and 5 August 2000 editions of this newsletter. However, the Making of America" (MOA) collection continues to expand. This week I re-visited the University Library’s online site and found numerous items I had not found before.

The MOA collection is a major resource for the study of 19th-century America. While it is not a genealogy collection, it does provide an insight into the lives of your ancestors. It shows what the major journals of the period had to say about developments in politics, literature, and science. While initially created as a collaborative project with the University of Michigan and funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the new MOA Web site has been developed with the support of the Library of Congress.

The Making Of America Web site now provides full-text access to more than 900,000 pages of primary sources in American cultural and social history. MOA contains some material published as early as 1815, but the bulk of the collection is focused on publications issued between 1840 and 1900. It is particularly strong in the subject areas of education, psychology, American history, sociology, religion, and science and technology. MOA's 22 serial titles include the Atlantic Monthly, Harper's, Scribner's, and Scientific American, as well as lesser-known journals such as the American Whig Review, The Old Guard, and The Living Age. These serial publications hold approximately 150,000 works by Americans such as John Muir, Kate Chopin, Herman Melville, Frederick Douglass, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Andrew Carnegie, Thomas Edison, Walt Whitman, Harriet Beecher Stowe, General George Custer, and countless others.

New since my last visit, the Making Of America site now includes 267 monographs, among which are The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies,The Official Records of the Union and Confederate Navies in the War of the Rebellion, and several local New York State histories and genealogies.

All of the information is available online as full text and is open and free to everyone.

The user can search for individual words found in the collection of published texts. One can also browse by title, author, journal, or year. Search results can be displayed as images of the scanned pages or as text, and individual pages can be converted to PDF format for printing. In other words, you can print copies of the original pages on your local laser or inkjet printer.

I found that the method of searching this huge database is excellent. The user can do simple searches for word or phrases as well as more complex Boolean searches or even searches for words that appear near other words. For instance, I did a search for the word "Eastman" that appears within five words of the word "Washington." Several such occurrences were reported within 2 or 3 seconds. I looked at one promising one: Official records of the Union and Confederate Navies in the War of the Rebellion. / Series I - Volume 5: Operations on the Potomac and Rappahannock Rivers (7 December 1861 - 31 July 1865); Atlantic Blockading Squadron (April 4, 1861 - July 15, 1861). I clicked on that and found myself looking at a scanned image of page 459, which listed the contents of a telegram from Gideon Welles, Secretary of the Navy, sent to Lieutenant-Commander T. H. Eastman at the Navy Yard in Washington, D.C. on 10 July 1864. Secretary Welles ordered several boats to be deployed to different locations to be ready for battle in the Civil War.

I then spent more time doing advanced searches, looking for names of ancestors and also conducting Boolean searches of family surnames and the towns in which they lived. Most of the searches came up empty, but a couple of gems did appear. For instance, I found a great-great-great-uncle listed in a magazine published in 1851. The article cited him as a farmer and merchant of some success, a fact that I did not know previously.

The Library’s staff reports several success stories have been relayed to them. In one instance, a man in Alaska located a photograph of his wife's grandfather in a journal in the collection. His wife had never before seen a photograph of her grandfather, Beniah, a Dog Rib Indian leader. Beniah had served as a guide on an exploration of the north country, and the photograph appeared in an article reporting on the expedition.

In short, the Cornell Library Making of America Online Collection is an excellent resource with many thousands of original documents available online. Like any large collection of popular literature, finding information of genealogy interest is a bit of a "hit or miss" proposition. However, you’ll never know until you try!

You can look for yourself at: cdl.library.cornell.edu/moa