This was one of the first annotated bibliographies on names. Smith published it originally in 1952 under the auspices of the New York Public Library. He deliberately did not copyright it so it would be available to everyone. What we have done here was to transfer the basic items so that they could be used on the web.
In locating items, there are several ways to go about it, author, subject, and title. A simple FIND command can be used.
For author: It will speed things up if the author's name is known if a < (left arrow) is placed for the name being searched, as < Zola.
About Elsdon Coles Smith 1903-1996
Born in 1903, he attended the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, and went on to law school where he became a faculty member at the University of Chicago. He became a successful lawyer and had a strong interest in times authoring several books: The Book of Smith, American Surnames, The New Dictionary of American Surnames, and others. He was a co-founder of the American Names Society in 1951 and was its first president.
The bibliography presented here represents a tremendous accomplishment, especially for its day. Not only did he compile the list of items, he went to see and evaluate them. The original book shows his evaluations and further even indicates in what libraries the items were in. This was done in the age before computers and meant that he had to travel to the libraries to locate the item. This bibliography lives on as his legacy.
