On January 1, 2019, over 50,000 books and works from 1923 have been released from copyright law and entered the public domain and are free for all to use without permission. The books and works released can be found on various websites such as Google Books, Internet Archive, and HathiTrust. Many famous works released include The Ten Commandments by Cecil B. DeMille and The Murder on the Links by Agatha Christie. New Hampshire by Robert Frost is in the public domain now, and this book includes many of his famous poems such as “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.” Fortunately, for genealogists, almost 11,000 digitized books that pertain to family histories and lineage publications are among those released.
Up until 1998, copyrights for books and works lasted for seventy-five years. In 1998, Congress enacted the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act and delayed the release of these books for twenty years after pressure to protect the copyright of Mickey Mouse. Because of this, the works that should have entered the public domain on 1 January 1998 had to wait until 2019. The works published in 1923 will enter the public domain in 2020 and so on.
Nancy Loe in her blog, Sassy Jane Genealogy, posted an article “Genealogy Books from 1923 Now Available.” She has some great hints on how to find genealogy books released the first of this year. She states that “using the search string ‘date:1923 AND mediatype:texts AND genealogy’ at Internet Archive gives you a list of 187 genealogy books and other publications.” Nancy also suggests trying specific surnames or geographic locations to have more specific results.
GenealogyBank has a blog by Gena Philibert-Ortega, “Happy Public Domain Day! New Resources for Genealogists.” She found some fantastic social history information that would give us insight into the lives of our ancestors. A book Gena mentions is Edith Wharton’s A Son at the Front. A terrific book for social information about World War I and what it was like to lose a child. Another book she mentions is The Log of a Forty-Niner that has fun information on what it was like to be a fortune-seeker.
There are many books, now free to use, that can help us in our research or even to understand our ancestors better. As you check out the new releases, don’t forget the neat cookbooks that are a great insight into early 20th-century cuisine.
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