Genealogists use digital scans of out of copyright books and records all the time. If the scan you have located online has pages or areas that are difficult to read, consider that another site may have scanned a different copy or the book or used a different scanning process. It may also be necessary to see if a library can make a photocopy of that “bad page” or if a better scan is available through the original holder of the record.
Indexes are generally only used to get the researcher to the record that was used to create the index. There is always the chance that the indexer made a mistake or that there is more on the record than is in the index. If the originals are gone as sometimes is the case, then the index is all we have. And occasionally an indexer will add information to the index that’s not in the original record. But no matter the situation, you should at least ask yourself: how do I find the record that this index indexes? Failing to ask that question could be your problem.
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