Yes, I know there is an ongoing debate and an as yet unresolved legal settlement about the propriety and copyright legality of Google Books. But I have two family stories that bring home on a personal level the value of the Google Books concept.

The search context is this:

I am that person in my family who has become the historian, the one who has taken on the task of doing the whole family history and genealogy thing. This is something I have done since about 1990, and which became immeasurably more productive an undertaking since the late 90s, with the access-to-knowledge explosion we call the Web and the dramatic improvements in web search and findability. The bulk of research I have done in the last five years has been at Ancestry.com, the reigning fee-based genealogy site (and one well worth its cost). I have also found an enormous amount of other family-related material by simply searching publicly available web content.

Which brings me to Google Books. Doing some conventional Google searches, I found one thing I expected and another I did not. The one book I expected to find was Auto Math Handbook: Basic Calculations, Formulas, Equations and Theory for Automotive Enthusiasts, by John Lawlor, an uncle (now deceased) who back in the day was a well known automotive journalist and one-time senior editor of Motor Trend magazine. No one in my family remotely understands “displacement, stroke and bore,” but we loved Uncle John and it was great to rediscover his book.

The second personal Google Books story comes out of a search for the Butte Irish side of my family, something I have alluded to before. It is there that I discovered what is to me now the single most important court decision of the 19th Century: Lawlor v. Kemper, an 1898 Montana Supreme Court decision resolving a legal dispute between my great-grandfather William Vincent Lawlor and his partner over the sharing of an enormous real estate commission. (For perspective, multiply the numbers by 10 for a rough equivalent in current dollars and you’ll better understand the financial stakes.)

I am pleased to say my great grandfather was the prevailing party, notwithstanding some transparently bad behavior by his attorney. The decision includes this timeless bit analyzing the character of my great-grandfather’s partner:

From a casuistic standpoint, a possession of the ability to discharge a just obligation to a fellow man should encourage the performance of the duty. This case, however, serves to illustrate how easily, through wealth, even when acquired in a sudden and unexpected manner, avarice can be substituted for conscience, and human nature made revolting at the very time when all its higher traits are placed in a position to readily assert themselves.

True, I could have searched for this using Westlaw or Lexis but I did not know to do so. I found this because Google found it in one of its digital scans of 19th Century Harvard law books.

Thank you, Google.