Fat Old Histories: Finding Franklin County Pennsylvania

The smell of old books puts some people to sleep. Not me. I love the possibility of opening a musty, fat book that has been gathering a dusty aura for years on a forgotten shelf.Crack the cover and who knows what might fall out?

One of the great vehicles for eavesdropping on the past are finding books written at the time and place.  Many locals in the United States have County Histories that were published around 1875.  Apparently, there was a frenzy of publishing that celebrated the 100 year American centennial. These books are big, quirky volumes that recall the history of a place, generally a county.  They are written in an upbeat, booster tone that celebrates their noble European ancestors. They celebrate the fore bearers that cut the forests, shoved the Indians aside settled in to build a new, improved version of the old country in the Americas. These books also have a liberal sprinkling of biographies of the solid (male) citizens of the day. Often these bios come with engraved portraits. My intuition is that these august men were paying sponsors of the volumes. 

Despite their shortcomings, these old books offer a refreshing historical view of a place from an unvarnished white guy perspective.  A reference librarian can help find local histories. Many of these books can be read in digitized versions if you don't mind missing the musty smell.

Sources of information about Greencastle and the south central Pennsylvania of our Allison kin can be found in books like: 

Historical sketch of Franklin County, Pennsylvania, 1878 

by M'Cauley, I. H; Suesserott, J. L. (Jacob Lewis); Kennedy, D. M

Franklin County One Hundred Years Ago, Alexander Thompson

(an article from The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, Volume 8. Historical Sketches of Franklin) 

Good sources of digitized books available for free include:

Internet Archive: Digital Library of Free Books, Movies, Music & Wayback Machines

googlebooks - Google Search

 Collections: Ancestry and Genealogy | HathiTrust Digital Library
  

Family History Books