New York Public Library, OCRs and whatnot...

I hit the Schwarzmann Building (Milstein and Map Divisions) last week in NYC, and had a chance to examine:

History of Darke County, Frazer Ellis Wilson, 1914

The History of Darke County, W.H. Beers, 1880

The Biographical History of Darke County, 1900

The two former were most useful, the third very little. I've since procured OCR (optical character recognition) versions of the two I found useful, but let me warn any who would attempt similar: OCRs are crap. Optical Character Recognition technology is hit-and-miss. These versions, unedited, are rife with blatant typos, making them difficult to make sense of in some places. "N" is sometimes translated as "X". "W"s as quotation marks. If anything is to be made of them beyond the notes I already made in NYC, they'll have to be cross-referenced with online resources to guard against error. Pity that proper editing for these isn't deemed profitable. Clean modern reprints would be incredibly useful among the history-nut group.

The Map Division was rather less useful. Any images they make for me would prove unnecessarily expensive, and would grant no rights to reproduction. I know that once this work is finished, any rights to reproduction would be procured by the publishing house, but I like to have everything done myself. Little control freak in me, I guess.

I have a bid in for a copy of Swartwout's "Missie" on eBay. Swartwout was Annie's niece and accompanied her as an assistant overseas. The book is said to be truth and fiction in equal measure, but I'm welcoming such versions at this point. I want to see the apocrypha of Annie as well as the truth, and see what was skillfully woven, what was not, and what territory remains untread. I already have an interesting account for children, by Ellen Wilson, circa 1958.

And, watching "America: The Story of Us" tonight, I've learned that "milk-sickness" was caused by livestock eating white snakeroot, which injured not only the livestock, but also human consumers of the milk with its toxicity. Very useful, even though the cause of milk sickness wasn't recognized until well after the period I'm researching.