Product Description
The North Dakota Book Collection is a collection of 17 volumes relating to the history of North Dakota and its people primarily in the 18th and 19th centuries. Several of the volumes have great period illustrations and portraits of relevant historical figures.Here are the computer requirements to run and operate this CD. You must have a PC running Windows or a Macintosh running OS X or higher software and a web browser. All the manuals in this disk are in DJVU format. This format allows you to page through the manuals, enlarge pages for better viewing and print the individual pages or entire manual as well as many other things. The viewer is very intuitive to use and has a full help system to answer any questions you may have about its more advanced features. The viewer is included on the CD. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

Thank you Tom!
First, many thanks to Tom.It was amazing to read the stories of my family in print.Finally, someone had the patience to sit down and put all of it down in one place.I cried as I read the stories retold by my great-aunts and uncles, my grandfather, and cousins.Not because they were sad, but because I was so happy to know that all of the stories of their love for each other and the family, hard work, struggles, and triumhps can never be forgotten now.I will always treasure this book just I have all of the people who contributed, and those that the stories were about.

The Last Link, Dakota Territory Logan County 1887
Book review by Edna Boardman, Bismarck, North Dakota

In a series of 45 stand-alone essays, some originally printed in other works, Mueller skillfully connects 21st-century readers to a time of pioneering on the North Dakota prairie. My stomach tightened as I recalled living many of his stories of hard work on the farm: making things yourself and doing without modern amenities, caring for animals and eating what you produced yourself, haying and harvesting, milking and attending a little one-room school. There are oddities in his stories, things that may have been unique to his family's experience, but most of his stories have a rough equivalent in other families' experience. Examples: The practice of witching to find graves that even determined the sex of the person buried. A white rock that was special. A woman who practiced brauche and healed his ringworm.

Books like this have proliferated--thank goodness--as many sit down to pass on the story of a way of life lived during days that have vanished. So you might ask, why would I want to read this book when I know (or have read about) others who have experienced a life similar to the one the author describes? Because Mueller projects an unusually powerful sense of family, of connection to his forebears and relatives, and to place. He listened carefully to oral histories passed by his family concerning the very earliest settlers of his family who came from the Russian steppe to the plains of North America. He also visited the site of the old home place and identified the old clay house and the other buildings where his pioneering forebears homesteaded. Mueller includes biographical sketches of family members and the local country doctor and describes a 1903 wedding dinner. He doesn't have "women's work" very well in focus, but he has proved to be a much better writer than he dreamt he could be when he started writing these essays, and he has made a fine contribution to the personal-reminiscence literature of the Germans from Russia. ... Read more

Product Description
National Award Winner Guide to Genealogy Research resources in the Dakotas and elsewhere (especially North Dakota, South Dakota, Minnesota, Iowa, Wisconsin, Illinois). Includes Norwegians, Swedes, Germans/Germans from Russia, English, Scottish, Irish, Canadian, American Indians and other nationalities. Packed with over 200 pages of information on finding family history, this fun, helpful how-to book begins with an overview of Dakota history and settlement. The book includes information on everything from records to research sites, from heraldry to high-tech genealogy, from research tips to recordkeeping, and from family reunions to publishing a family history. The appendix features helpful forms, maps, and addresses for genealogy resources, and an extensive bibliography and index. This updated (second edition) of Tracing Your Dakota Roots adds fresh data on Internet and computer genealogy, as well as DNA research. Beginning and advanced researchers, librarians, instructors and students alike will find this unique, must-have book a helpful research tool. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

A fine genealogical tool, no matter where you live
I was asked to review this book for a publishing contest. How lucky I was! It is the finest book I've seen this season--full of wonderful information, attractively designed, and very fun to look through. I think you'll enjoythis book, whether or not you do genealogy (I don't!), and no matter whereyou live. It's an entertaining historical read. ... Read more