Finding Genealogy Clues in Historical Books

This is a recent article I received in my emails and found so true and useful. I have been working on putting together one line of our family as a gift to family and wanting to put history with it so there is more than names and dates. Our family lived what we call history. Wars, the Great Depression, epidemics etc.

My great great grandparents Dwight and Betsy Anderson lost three children in one year while living in Minnesota. This was the time of the Scarlet fever epidemic and that is probably the cause of their death.

My ancestors fought in the Revolutionary war, the Civil war. They lived in America during the puritan times and the Salem witch hunt trials. One source has that my Robert Lockwood's wife Susannah and daughter testified at the witch trials. I will need to do some reading to see if I find her name.

They crossed America looking for a new place and life. So much history to add to our family research.
Here is the email I received the other morning....
Finding Genealogy Clues in Historical Books Posted by Diane
Why are historical books important to your research? Because your family didn’t live in a vacuum, says Family Tree Magazine contributing editor Nancy Hendrickson.
I got a sneak peek today at her Historical Books on the Web webinar (taking place tomorrow, Oct. 27, at 7 p.m. Eastern time). She says that clues you’ll find in books about the history of the places your ancestors lived include the big events that impacted their lives, what their everyday lives were like and, when you lose their trail, why or where they might've moved. Some examples of local events you might learn about in historical books:
1848 to 1849 cholera epidemic, which killed 4,000 in New York City
1888 Children’s Blizzard in the Great Plains (so-called because many children were caught unaware in schoolhouses on what had been a relatively warm day)
1869 Indian Raids in Kansas
Order No. 11 (a Union Army decree that forced the evacuation of rural areas in four western Missouri counties in 1863)
Great Fire of 1846 in Nantucket
You can get started looking for historical books about your ancestral locales by Googling history of [insert the town name], visiting county pages at USGenWeb, searching library catalogs (WorldCat is a good site for doing this) and searching for period books at sites such as Internet Archive and Making of America.
Nancy will get into detail about what you can find in historical books, and where and how to find them, in tomorrow’s webinar, Historical Books on the Web: Millions of Tomes at Your Fingertips. You can register to attend at ShopFamilyTree.com (you'll receive our new Discover Your Roots guide with your registration)—and use the code HISTORY10 for 15 percent off with our Family History Month storewide sale. ShopFamilyTree.com Sales Social History Webinars
Tuesday, October 26, 2010 3:47:34 PM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)

Sorry I missed this email on when I first received it. There is still some great links for us anyway.

Time to sit down with some history books as I work on my genealogy. Putting some depth to my family information will make it all the more interesting.

Thanks for stopping by.. Grace