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View the list of Arkansas Goodspeed bio sketches

In the 1880s and 1890s, Goodspeed Publishing Company of Chicago produced dozens of county history compilations covering many of the Southern and Midwestern states. Eight of the books include Arkansas folks. We're offering them in electronic form with searchable text on CDs.

Goodspeed volumes usually follow a standard format. The first 112 pages are a general history of Arkansas, then chapters are devoted to each included county. County chapters are laid out with a detailed history covering early settlement with a list of the earliest settlers, boundary changes, geographic data, climate, crops, livestock, transportation, population figures, county government (with lists of officials), attornies, industry, businesses, towns and cities, newspapers, Civil War events and units, schools, churches, hangings and lynchings, followed by biographical sketches of the prominent citizens (anyone who paid the fee) of the county.

The publisher apparently sent out questionnaires as the biographical data submitted follows a routine pattern. The information collected was typed and sent back to submitters for corrections. Volumes were sold on a "subscription" basis, that is, commissioned salespeople sold them, probably taking most of their orders when the biographical data was collected. The books themselves are lovely-large, gilt-edged tomes, but they're very rare now. A few of the submitters (about one in a few hundred) included portraits of themselves. In our list of the 7,350 people covered, an asterisk ( * ) denotes an included portrait.

Click here to view the list of all the people whose bio sketches are included in the eight Goodspeed volumes which cover Arkansas (and the Ozark portion of Missouri). (Then click "back" on your browser to return to this page.) There are thousands more people mentioned in these books and the searchable text on the CDs will turn up those references. This list is just the tip of the iceburg.

In order to more clearly identify these folks who head the biographical sketches, we put in their years of birth and birthplaces if they were given in the first part of the bio sketch. The sketches themselves contain much more detailed information.

Folks included aren't all white men. Nearly, but not all. There are 25 "colored" men (we've added "AfAm" to their names in our index), and fifty women (we put in their maiden names, too).

As an example of what these biographical sketches contain, click here for a sample sketch. (This one is on Tyre M. Lingo, and if you're related to him, we're cousins.)

• These CDs contain the books in Adobe's portable document format (.pdf). Nearly all computers, Windows and Mac, come with a software program, Adobe Acrobat Reader, pre-installed so everyone can read .pdfs.
• To get the latest version of this free software, go to www.Adobe.com and click on the "get Adobe Reader" button. Follow instructions to download and install the program. As of this writing (April, 2007), version 7 is the latest available. To see if you have Adobe Reader on your computer, click "Start" then "Programs" and check the displayed list for Adobe Reader.
• To use the CD, just put the disc in your CD drive. Click on "Start" then "My Computer" and then click on the drive containing the disc. Double click the .pdf filename and Adobe Reader will open and display the book.

• Enlarge the print! Play with the settings on the "View" menu and enlarge the print for easier reading.
• Under the "Edit" menu, click on the "Find" or "Search" options. These Goodspeed files (except the one for Conway County) have been processed with OCR (optical character recognition) software. It was about 95% successful with the old type. Search for "coal mines" or "gold rush" or other topics, names, and places.
• If you want to clip out a portion to paste into another program, use the camera icon (snapshot tool) on the toolbar. Click on it, then drag and mark the portion of text you want to capture. When you release the mouse button, the information is copied to the Windows clipboard. Switch to the other program (MS Word, for example) and paste (Control+V) the clipboard contents wherever you want it. Here's a tip for using this feature: enlarge the text on the screen before you use the snapshot tool. This creates text at a higher resolution so it'll appear sharper in the application you paste it into.