a bit about me, ebay and more
lee oxford
...how I started...
my first glimpse of eBay came on new year's day 2001. had heard about it, but had never been to the site. but, by the end of that same day, i opened my seller account and listed a couple of theology books. every hour, i went back to the computer to watch the hit counters. i was hooked on hits and began selling a wide variety of books, not really knowing what people wanted or how much they were willing to pay. cookbooks, children's books, biographies - there couldn't have been a more eclectic offering.

but within a few months, i gravitated more toward historical books. i found that volumes with very specific historical subjects attracted more interest and higher prices, particularly 19th-century non-fiction. i enjoyed finding volumes that would interest my return customers. even if they didn't sell high, i knew the books i located were helping other people with their own research or collections. besides, i was doing research of my own and could relate to the rush of locating those hard-to-find items.

i was researching the capture of a small army transport steamer in the pamlico sound, inside hatteras island, in early october 1861. my great-great-grandfather, elias oxford, was a 31-year-old private with the 20th indiana volunteers and was captured by the 3rd georgia regiment who were sneaking down from roanoke island. my interest in this story, and the subsequent imprisonment of these 73 men and boys, drove me to read, visit civil war sites, and spend long days at the national archives in washington. i was always looking for unique material that would help flesh out this long-forgotten bunch of hoosiers who would have to sit out the next year of the war in southern prisons. then, i came upon my greatest source of new and first-hand material - historic newspapers.

while visiting an antique shop in search of books, i discovered the owner was one of the three or four largest dealers of antiquarian newspapers in the country. he let me spend hours browsing through some volumes, and i bought several issues of the new york herald from october and november 1861. two of those issues are displayed on my office wall today - one with a map of hatteras island laying out the october 1861 conflict, and the other paper with the list of 20th indiana captives with my ancestor's name among them on the front page. that's when old newspapers took on a new importance to me.

i moved almost exclusively into early 19th-century newspapers by the summer of 2005. each day, i realize many more people, like me, are looking for information that can only be found in the news of the day - in historic newspapers.