Thursday, November 04, 2004

Grantor Index 1966-75

We've complete our work on the Grantor Index from 1966 to 1975. It's not in a searchable database like the index from 1976 to the present. Instead, it's a type of electronic book. We simply scanned the pages of the existing bound index books for those years and saved them as Adobe PDF files, with one file per letter. Some letters have more than 1000 pages, though, so we constructed a simple table of contents for each letter. The table of contents consists of the first name that appears on each page and the corresponding page number. To find a name, you open the correct letter-file, browse through the pages of the table of contents until you find a name close to the one you're researching, and then use the "Go To" function to jump to that page. Just as with a book, you can flip pages forward and back to check for spelling variations. There's no direct link to the document images (yet), but once you get the book and page number, you can switch to the program that contains our document images (which go back to 1950) and then view or print anything. These PDF files tend to be on the large size, so using them on the Internet really won't work. Instead, we'll provide the complete set of these files to anyone who wants them, free of charge. All you have to do is supply us with 2 blank CDs and we'll copy everything for you. You can then use the CDs on your own computer or, if you have enough free disk space, copy them right to your computer's hard drive.

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