J. H. Beers, Historical and Biographical Annals of Schuylkill County (1916)
About this source
J. H. Beers & Company’s Historical and Biographical Annals of Schuylkill County is a two-volume biographical compendium published in Chicago in 1916, in the prolific Beers genre of county-history-and-biography subscription books that flourished in the United States from roughly 1880 to 1925. Volume I runs to 1,216 pages and is the volume currently in the schuylkillhub corpus.
The book opens with a preface stating that “in nearly every instance the material composing the sketches was gathered from those immediately interested, and all were submitted in typewritten form for correction and revision” — that is, the biographical entries are primarily subscriber-submitted, with the subjects (or their families) providing and approving the text. This is the genre’s known editorial posture: comprehensive coverage of paying subscribers, with all the strengths (rich first-person family detail, named source attribution) and weaknesses (no entries for those who didn’t subscribe; uneven coverage by town and class) that follow.
The book is in the public domain in the United States by virtue of its publication date (prior to 1929). schuylkillhub republishes its text and indexes verbatim where useful, cites every page reference back to the archive.org scan, and links every Beers-derived assertion to the page it came from so readers and downstream LLMs can verify.
Structure
| Section | OCR lines (in archive.org djvu.txt) | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Cover / title pages | 1–89 | scanned title-page graphics; not used |
| Preface | 90–124 | editorial posture, scope statement |
| Index | 125–3836 | alphabetical name + family + organization index with page citations; structured table parsed by the extraction pipeline |
| Biographical sketches | 3841–end (≈ pp. 1–1216 of the print book) | one paragraph per biographical sketch, opening with the subject’s name in ALL CAPS |
Coverage notes
Volume I of Beers 1916 is biographical and genealogical; it is not an event timeline. Reach for it when you need:
- A baseline list of who was in a given town in the early-twentieth-century period
- Family-tree fragments (spouses, children, parents, occupations, churches, fraternal orders)
- The contemporary spelling and identification of a Schuylkill County surname
- Cross-references between surnames that intermarried
Reach for other sources (Chronicling America newspapers, Beers vol. 2, the Schalck 1907 History, the 1893 Biographical and Portrait Cyclopedia) for:
- Dated events, accidents, deaths, court proceedings
- Persons who did not subscribe to Beers — particularly the Welsh, Irish, and Eastern-European coalmining workforce
- Twentieth-century history past the book’s publication date
- Industry, geography, and town-level history at depth
Honesty guardrails
- Every assertion drawn from Beers 1916 must cite the specific page.
- The index is OCR-derived; surnames and given names should be verified against the corresponding archive.org page scan before being published as fact.
- Beers occasionally repeats family lore that is genealogically unsupported (e.g. patriot ancestors of unproven descent); pages on schuylkillhub do not amplify these claims without independent corroboration.
- The book’s biographical coverage is skewed toward subscribers; absence of a person or family from the index is not evidence of absence from the county.
Sources
- Internet Archive item record
License: public-domain
Pages on schuylkillhub that cite this source
Surname indexes
- Wagner — 11 citations