The Townsend Society’s Historic Newsletter on Flashdrive

 

 

The Townsend Society of America was organized in 1962 at the Raynham Museum, Oyster Bay, New York.  At the suggestion of then Oyster Bay Town Historian Herbert Hale to some of the interested Townsend family members attending this meeting, the idea of a permanent
society was immediately approved. Mr. Hale proceeded with its organization as an historical, genealogical and memorial group on October 28, 1962.

Regular newsletters, generally quarterly, were published beginning in October 1963. From 1963 to 1976 the publication was known as the Townsend Topics and from 1976 to 2001 The Townsend Newsletter. Both evolved into the Townsend Society’s current Townsend GenealogicalJournal.

A few years ago an effort began to electronically scan all of the Topics and Newsletters, convert them to digital text, and extensively index them. The result is what you now have. There are over 3600 surnames listed with over 49,000 citations. Also included are
images of the original documents, their digitized transcriptions, and an index of localities. These transcriptions represent a text version of the scanned documents and are fully searchable.
 

The flashdrive is fully searchable with the index linked to pages. There are scans of the original documents, organized in order, and named as they were originally named. These documents were additionally scanned electronically and converted to text that can be searched using the facility available through Acrobat Reader. These converted text documents, transcriptions of the originals, have been extensively indexed for both names and locations. If printed this would be an 1100 page document.

 

The material is organized to make it easier to get to the information you are looking for. We’ve made extensive use of Acrobat’s Bookmark feature to guide your way. Just find the topic you are interested in, click on its bookmark, and the image will pop up on the screen.

 

 

           Bookmark Example

Search Example

Click On The First Katie...

...Jump Straight To The Text...

 

...Or You Can Look Up Katie in the Townsend ‘K’ Index

 

How Do I Get The CD? 

Members

Non Members

We chose Paypal because they charge the TSA less for secure credit card transactions. If you can't pay by credit card through Paypal, you can send check attn: Newsletter CD Purchase, TSA, P.O. Box 91356, Columbus, OH 43209-7356.

Flashdrive is $!5. The fastest way to buy it is via credit card through Paypal, a free service. Go to www.paypal.com for details. When at the Paypal site, when asked who to send it to, enter payments@townsendsociety.org. Or press one of these buttons to automatically start the process:

 

A Final Word

We hope that you will acquire and enjoy the TOWNSEND FAMILIES OF AMERICA CD and find it useful and supportive of your own family history research efforts.  If you have material not yet published by the Society or updates to material already published we would like to hear from you. Your contribution may be published in the Townsend Genealogical Journal.

 

We’re always interested in hearing from you, especially your thoughts on this CD and ideas for future products. Feel free to email us at president@townsendsociety.org. We’re always ready to accept your comments using regular mail as well. We try to respond to every one of them.