GenealogyClassBlog

I received an email from Footnote today with an update on their new situation. Here is the text of the email:

Several weeks ago Footnote.com (as part of iArchives) agreed to be acquired by Ancestry.com and that transaction has officially closed today. As we join forces with Ancestry.com there is a huge opportunity to leverage each other’s strengths and move even faster toward our goals. You may be curious about how this deal effects members of Footnote.com? The plan is to continue to run Footnote.com the way we have always run Footnote.com — continuing to do what we believe is best for our customers, our business and our brand.

Now that the deal is officially closed we are excited to leverage some of Ancestry.com’s resources and expertise to take Footnote.com to the next level. It has been exciting to see Footnote.com grow over the past 4 years. Footnote.com started with only 5 million historical documents and today we have nearly 70 million searchable documents, over 1 million members, nearly 100,000 Footnote Pages, and over half million annotations added. We couldn’t have done it without our members and the great team at Footnote.com and we are excited for Ancestry.com’s support in the next chapter.

I am glad to hear that Footnote.com will stay the same for now and will have the resources of the larger organization to make it even better. We talked about Footnote in class yesterday — and found Abraham Lincoln’s 1860 U.S. Federal Census image. Remember that Footnote.com has some historical documents that are free to view, and that library cardholders at the Tulsa City-County Library have access to Footnote.com at the Genealogy Center. To take a look at Footnote.com, visit www.footnote.com.

Footnote.com's Interactive Census Project Page

I was excited today to see this post by Dick Eastman. Footnote.com has just announced their plans to provide access to the entire U.S. Federal Census with the help of the National Archives. Dick’s blog post includes a long statement from Footnote.com about the unique capibilities that users will have of interacting with the census images. In class Tuesday we discussed tagging the images so that they are more searchable. That is only a small example of what you could do as a member of Footnote.com.

I currently have a subscription to Footnote.com, which has a reasonable price for what they offer. We’ll visit Footnote.com some more during next week’s class.

For more information, you should follow  http://blog.eogn.com/eastmans_online_genealogy/2009/10/entire-us-census-goes-interactive-with-footnotecom.html.