One of the useful aspects of Pressbooks is that authors can edit a title and add content whenever they need to. This allows errors to be corrected and materials to remain up to date as new information becomes available. How often have you discovered a problem in a textbook you’re using, and hoped it would be caught and corrected in the next edition in a few years?

Keeping up with research isn’t an issue only in the sciences, though. New information becomes available in all fields as researchers continue discovering new facts or refining their interpretations. For example, I recently discovered another historical source for my volume of primary readings relating to the Ranney brothers and their migrations across the continent in the nineteenth century.

The source wasn’t exactly new: it was a volume called the Compendium of history and biography of Hillsdale County, Michigan, written by Elon G. Reynolds in 1903. Reynolds’ work was typical of the genre, including about 80 pages of general history of the county and then over 450 pages of short biographical sketches of Hillsdale’s leading men and institutions. On pages 302 and 303 there is a sketch of Henry Ranney’s younger brother, Lemuel Sears Ranney.

The passage adds some details to Lemuel’s life I was not aware of, provides validation of some of the events Lemuel and his brothers describe in their letters, and gives us an interesting look at the elements of Lemuel’s story that seemed interesting to the editors of this 1903 volume, and presumably its readers. It also shows the degree of respect Michigan residents seem to have had for Ranney, who was still alive when the book was published.

This was all interesting enough to me that I wrote an extra short “chapter” about it and added it to the end of my ebook. Readers who are reading it online will find it automatically appended after the previous final chapter that covered Henry Ranney’s obituary. Folks who have downloaded the ebook or pdf versions to their own devices can return to the Pressbook’s homepage and download another. I’ll probably not be adding a lot more to this volume, but if I come across any new material it’s nice to be able to!