Norwood Books in PDF Download format - Free!

NORWOOD - NORTHWOOD families of KENT WARWICKSHIRE and GLOUCESTERSHIRE / J.G. Dempsey

Happy Saturday!  I found two pretty incredible books on the Norwood line that are in free pdf format that I wanted to share.  Both books are commonly sourced as evidence in family trees and can cost hundreds of dollars in paper form.  So it was great for me to find them in pdf form and to get to read them first hand.

I originally found the titles of the books I wanted here.  (I have tried contacting the owner of the site to thank him but my email bounced - I'd love to find them)

Both books are on familysearch.org, which is the LDS church.  No LDS membership or affiliation is required to get the books though.  To find the books, create an account on the site, sign in, click 'search' and then 'books' and type 'norwood' into the search field.

The two I found on familysearch.org are :
Dempsey, James G. Norwood-Northwood Families of Kent, Warwickshire and Gloucestershire. Cincinnati: The Author, 1983 - which is a really incredible history of the English norwood family from Jordanous all the way down.  Including all sorts of specific evidence.  It is such a fascinating read that I might have read it from cover to cover without stopping.  

The other was : Norwood, William Howard, James Harvey Norwood, Sr, and Henry Offie Norwood. Comp. "General" John Norwood and related lines. x, 424 p. col. coat of arms, ports. 24 cm. Dallas: Trumpet Press, 1964.  - Also a very interesting history of that part of my line that contains some photos.

Online General Genealogy Resources

Old textbooks / SellTextbooks / CC2.0

I've done the majority of my own research online and I've run across some pretty stellar resources in the course of my research. Some are kind of typical but some are maybe not so obvious. Over the next couple of weeks, I will post some family/location specific resources tht I've found helpful. But here are some general resources.

 Internet Archive : Books and Texts Archive - If you're researching something that has become the subject of history, you are likely to find something here. I found a great deal of information around Kent and Sheppey as it relates to the Norwood line.

 Ancestry.com - This site was really indispensable to my research. I think there are lots of arguments for and against sites like this and I can see myself writing a whole post on it at some point. The Cons include the fact that folks share family tree information that is not necessarily reliable or well researched. However, overall, I love the site and where there are lots of members, there are financial resources to obtain and archive genealogy information - power of the masses, if you will. Ancestry.com has an extensive collection of birth, death, social security and census data, among other things. If you join and use their records, I recommend downloading the actual image of the records you use as you go so that you have them to refer back to later.

Google Books - Google books has a ton of books in electronic format. Often, you can only access excerpts of them, depending upon their copyright status. BUT, sometimes, an excerpt is enough.

Familyesearch.org - I really like that they make so many resources available for free. I understand the power behind charging a fee... you then have resources to offer more (hopefully). But the LDS church has resources and has opted to allow free access (without membership to the LDS church) to so many resources and I've found myself grateful so many times for that access.

Hi

Family Tree / Carrie Norwood

My grandmother is the real genealogist in the family.  She painstakingly collected boxes of documentation from in person research at libraries and court houses.

My first excursion into family tree research was in middle school.  I created this poster with my family tree on it that went back 13 generations on my mom's side.  My grandmother sent me pages of handwritten notes to help me with it.  I didn't know my father at the time so I didn't have his side on it.  After moving umpteen times and downsizing and de-cluttering and cleaning out over and over through the years, that poster is still rolled up in my garage and my grandmother's notes are in a box somewhere.  Of all of the things to hang onto for 20 (plus) years, that was it.  So, it was meaningful to me.

And I think it was also meaningful that I didn't know my father or his family.  It became important to me, in the course of my budding interest in genealogy research to understand and know his family more - the best I could, even if it was only through getting to know people long since passed.  In the course of that, I reconnected with some living family on his side.  Hooray!  And also, inadvertently, became fascinated and fell in love with the family.

My family research has, for the most part, centered upon the family lines of Norwood (hereto forthwith to include Norwode, Northwood, Norwude etc), Yarbrough, Maynard, Sinks (and possibly Sykes), Kelly, Hursey and Bass and those family lines as they pertain mostly to Tennessee, Virginia and South Carolina, with a few exceptions.  So far, I have connections outside of the United States to England and Prussia.

I love research... fact finding.  I love categorizing and stashing information - having information.  There's still quite a bit I don't know yet, where genealogy research is concerned.  I'm certainly not a certified genealogist - or someone who has been educated in the role.  But I strive to be accurate and logical in my approach.  All of my research has thus far been based upon what I can find through personal interviews with family, books and online resources.  

I've been consistently frustrated with old defunct websites and email addresses.  There will be an amazing blurb written about someone I'm researching in a forum and no sources cited - and then email to the person to ask about sources bounces.  Dead ends upon more dead ends.  So I'd like for this blog to be a place where I can put details about someone I'm researching and get feedback or information from others researching the same person.  A place that doesn't go dead. Unless I go dead.  Knock on wood.