History of the County of Middlesex, Canada - 1889 (Publ. W.A. & C.L. Goodspeed, Ontario)

Cat No.:   CA0114:

All superlatives aside, this really is the most detailed and comprehensive area history book I have ever come across. At about the turn of the 19th century there was a flurry of books, written on commission, to record the biographies of some of the wealthier families in a particular area. Indeed this is one of them, but the approximately 460 biographies occupy only about a third of the book. The other two thirds of the book provides so much information on the history and make up of the Middlesex County it'll be impossible to do it full credit in this short description. Only by reading it will you realize the scale of this work.

Let's start by saying that the author went out of his way to mention the names of people living in the area if they had left any sort of record of their activities. I mean everything from being a member of a church committee to being involved in a court case and more. The vast majority of the over 1000 pages of the book carry some of the names of local inhabitants, or of outsiders who were in some way associated with Middlesex. There are even transcriptions of some of the early parish registers giving the records of marriages from about 1833 through about 1839 (depending on the church.) There are brief histories of the formation of all sorts of public bodies, from town councils to orchestras, from Masonic lodges to horticultural societies. And each record includes the names of all the people involved. There are lists of the burials of the victims of the sinking of the Princess Victoria which took place during the celebrations of 24 May, 1881 and lists of the Professors teaching in the London Medical College starting on 24 May 1882. There are lists of names for everything.

And yet more than just lists of names. Each township and each city has its own paragraph describing how it originated and how it was organized. There are copies of early accounts showing the civil income and expenditure. The details are just endless.

Then, to put the cherry on the top, comes the 460 biographies. Most of the biographies feature one individual although, of course they also define his lineage and record his children, but there are also a few family biographies and even one or two biographies of commercial enterprises.

Our version of this book on CD, has been processed through our state-of-the-art OCR application and is fully searchable using any of the free PDF interpreters like Acrobat Readerª. This means that the fund of genealogical and historical information it contains can be easily accessed.

If you are looking for a research resource for Middlesex County in the period before the late 1880's this is the book you need. To give you a further feel for what is on this CD we have made a Sampler and Names List from it which are freely available to you on our Ontario Downloads web page.

You can also reach this Sampler and Names List by clicking on the following links Sampler, Names List. You can return to this page by closing the Sampler Page when you are ready to purchase.

Review all our Free Samplers by clicking on FREE DOWNLOADS.

No. of CDs is:  1 ;   Format is:  PDF ;   Searchable?:  YES;

FastFind:  No;  ISBN No.:   1-897338-40-6;