The Ancestry.com "Our Name in History" series of books is now available at Amazon.com through BookSurge, the Print on Demand Service. These books give the history behind a family name in a custom-printed book.
The Our Name in History series is customized by surname and created using historical records dating from the 1600s to provide a blend of interesting facts, statistics and commentary about a surname. There is a unique book in the series for each of the most common 279,000 last names in America.
If you are looking for a unique Christmas present, this series serves as an excellent entry level tool to help the beginner and non-genealogist get excited about family history. The end of the book also has a section on “How to gather and organize information about your family”.
The book follows a family name through history to get an idea of where people sharing the surname settled and where they may reside today in the United States, Canada, England and other countries.
The book differs from other “surname” books in the past in that the “Our Name in History” book is actually full of interesting FACTS about the last name. Ancestry takes the records from the Ancestry website and other sources and pull these facts out and summarizes them in a custom book. The facts that are included in these books ranging from name distribution to life expectancy to Civil War service to immigration.
The “Our Name in History” books by Ancestry include information about a surname, not a particular individual or family. I got one of the books last year when they were available from the Ancestry.com website. My husband, who is not a genealogist, found the book of his surname fascinating and read the book cover to cover.
To find your surname, click on Our Name in History and add your surname to the Amazon search box. Free shipping.
The press release yesterday says:
The Our Name in History series leverages Ancestry.com's unmatched historical data to chronologically trace a particular last name and tell its story through interesting facts placed in a historical context," said David Symonds, general manager, BookSurge. "These unique books offer hard-to-find historical information on hundreds of thousands of common U.S. surnames and make a great holiday gift for friends and family."
"This collection sets a new standard for customized books available on-demand," said Scott Sorenson, Senior Director Commerce of Ancestry.com. "
With BookSurge's Print on Demand technology, it's now economically possible for us to make this breadth of selection available to millions of Amazon customers. We are excited about this collaboration that allows more people access to these timeless, priceless books." The 279,000 last names represented in the Our Name in History series account for nearly 90 percent of all U.S. households, according to the 2002 U.S. White Pages.
To create these books, Ancestry.com studied more than five billion names from U.S. Census data, as well as immigration, birth, marriage, death, military and other historical records to detail origin, definition, popularity and other facts unique to each name"
