Welcome to the Hamilton County, Illinois Reference Lookups page.  Below you will find a listing of Hamilton County reference books and volunteers who will do short lookups for you.  If you would like to become a lookup volunteer, please contact me with "Hamilton County Volunteer" in the subject line.  For each book, I need to know the title, author, publisher, publication place and year, format (number of pages, is it indexed, etc.), and purchase information (if available).  I would be interested in information on any Hamilton County books not listed below, even if you can't become a lookup volunteer for it.

I have provided purchase information for books below as a service to visitors of this web site and to the authors of the books.  I am not involved in and do not profit from the sales of any books listed on this page.

Guidelines for requesting information from a lookup volunteer:
1)  This is a free service, courtesy of our volunteers, so please don't request or expect a volunteer to do a bunch of actual research for you.
2)  Be as specific as possible in your request and limit it to one or two individuals or families.  Please don't ask for something like all of the SMITHs or JONESes on the 1900 census.
3)  Be aware of the "Fair Use" provisions of the copyright laws.  Short lookups of publicly available information are fine.  However, the distribution of photocopies or verbatim transcriptions of significantly large sections of a work still under copyright protection without the author's permission is a definite no-no.  For the curious, see here for more info.
4)  Be patient.  The volunteers are often inundated with requests and it may take some time for them to get to yours.  I'm sure they have lives and families away from the computer (unlike myself).
5)  Don't forget to thank the volunteer for taking the time to look up the information for you.