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Over who knows how many years, Reed Howard accumulated information on baseball players who played baseball from as early as the Civil War times on into the 20th Century. These files can be found at a Dropbox site maintained by Dr. Theodore Turocy and the Chadwick Baseball Bureau. There is a lot of data in these files, and I am attempting to organize it into some sort of coherent form because... well, mostly because I'm an idiot who thinks I can do that. I started with the 65 files containing information on more than 35,000 baseball players across more than 145,000 entires. The files (created in Numbers, the Macintosh version of Excel) are organized alphabetically, from "A" in File #1 to "Y,Z" in File #65. This seemed to be a surmountable, if not time-consuming, task when I started.
If one is patient, one can comb through these files to find all entires for players associated with the 1895 Galveston club (for example). This site is an effort to make that process easier (hopefully) by allowing one to search the records directly for this information. That goal - the desire to search these records easily - is what drove the creation of this web site. Reed Howard spent a lot of time accumulating this data. (Maybe I can ask him to speak to that at some point.) While there may be very few people who are interested in browsing it or using it for their research into the roots of baseball in the 19th Century, I hope those who do come here are able to find details that help their work, as I have.
Caveat: I make no claim as to the accuracy of the data in these files. Research into 19th Century baseball is hard, made difficult by the fact that some players are identifed only by last names in boxscores. Names were mispelled or given incorrectly, making one player seem like two. As new information comes to light, the connections change. Tying the appearance of a player with a club in one city in one year to another elsewhere a few years later takes luck in many cases, as few players were prominent enough to have complete biographies published. Plus, typos happen (both now and then), and I will inevitably mess up some of the data as I process it to get it into this database.
So when you retrieve an entry from this database, I will provide a reference as to the file from which the data originally came, so you can see the entry in its original context if you wish. This will allow you to assess the accuracy of my 'translation'. I also strongly suggest that if a reference is provided with the information, look at that reference. If no reference is provided, try to find a second source for the information. Even unverified information can point a researcher in a new direction that yields results.
Most seasons in this database after 1900 have not been processed yet, so searches for players and teams after that point may not work due to the use of abbreviations in the original records. Records between 1871 and 1900 have been processed at least once to try and connect them to entires in Baseball-Reference (as of roughly May 2024, when I started this process). I make no guarantees that BBR hasn't been updated since, rendering some of my connections void.