As time progresses so does the availability of family history records online.
As we move forward it becomes increasing imperative for family history researchers to go online and do research. Gone are the days of all hands-on research. We all knew it would come to this someday. Yet researching in the online world is made complicated by two things. The records appearing online are scattered and what records there are many times cannot be 100% trusted since the data may have been entered by a human.
As any family history researcher who has been online knows there is no way to avoid an eventual membership to Ancestry.com or access to it. This is the premier online genealogy research site. Any researcher who wants to move forward quickly probably needs access to this site to do so. We all do want to move forward quickly because, lets face it, genealogy becomes a rush to complete what you can before you become an ancestor yourself!
Footnote.com is another online family history research site you need to think about joining. It also is becoming a mandatory site. With regularity the only two online sites we belong to are Ancestry.com and Footnote .com. Even if we neglect to join some of our other sites every year, we make sure we at least join those two.
We want to particularly discuss Footnote.com right now because it is increasingly becoming a really cool site (as well as useful to family history research, of course). If you don’t already belong to it you will want to take a look. It is a little confusing to use at first but the amount of information available there is staggering. Currently there are nearly 53 million historical documents there! This is not a sales pitch. Footnote.com is simply becoming a premier research site.
What is the coolest thing about Footnote.com? They provide the original scanned copies of the documents they have. Pay attention to this important fact. The documents there are not indexes or copies of handwritten copies; they are scanned copies of real documents. So you get to see the original source records. As a family history researcher this is like finding a pot of gold!
The Free Material
There are several good free things on Foonote.com if you would like to try the site. Some of the free reading material is just plain interesting reading, but may not have much to do with genealogy. Most of it does though. Some examples are below, but that is not all that is there.
-Free Photos. You can upload your own and make comments on others photos, as well as view a huge library of historic photos for free.
-You can read Project Blue Book which contains 13,000 government UFO reports on sightings from around the world.
-You can look at the complete Pennsylvania Archives, which is 100,000 pages of information from 1664-1880. This publication contains everything from tax, early military and early marriage records to historical accounts of Pennsylvania events from the Revolutionary War. It is essential to Pennsylvania family history research.
-The Papers of the Continental Congress are here for free. These were the official records of the early congress from 1774-1781.
Membership Benefits
There is almost too much on Footnote.com to cover in this article. The major benefit of this site to family history researchers is the ability to see original documents and to attach notes to these documents. Through the notes and interactions with other people looking at the same documents you can share information and history with each other. It kind of connects original documents, with photos with stories with comments so that you get a much broader and updated view of the things you are looking for.
Footnote.com puts it like this, “…is a place where original historical documents are combined with social networking in order to create a truly unique experience involving the stories of our past.”
The help section has some very good introductory videos so you can learn to work with the site better. I suggest starting with these as they do help a lot. When we first got into Footnote.com we were confused as to how to use it. It is heavily picture oriented so a fast internet connection is best. The software they use which lets us read documents is powerful but can get bogged down.
I can’t emphasize enough the staggering information being put on this site. They add millions of records a year, so you do have to go back in often. They are especially big on war records. I found the complete Revolutionary War pension records of my 4th great grandfather. It was a scan of all the documents in his file at the National Archives. Incredible!
Some documents they are currently putting on the site are:
-Board of Commissioners – Emancipation of Slaves in DC
-Civil War IRS Records – PA
-Civil War “Widows’ Pensions”
-Bayland Orphan Home Records
-Custer’s Court Martial
-FBI Case Files
-Missing Air Crew Reports, WWII
-Mormon Battalion Pension Files
-Newspapers (317 titles)
-Passport Applications, 1795-1905
-Pensions Index, Civil War to 1900
-Much, much more….
Some of the above are currently free to use. They are not just indexes but scans of the originals. There is a little green bar next to the current items that Footnote.com adds which tells you the percentage of how far they are to completing a project.
There truly is nothing close to this on the internet and it is reasonably priced at $55-$65 per year (they offer specials often so the price is in this range). One trip to the National Archives, even if you live close, would cost more than that. If you are at all into both history and family history research we suggest you try Footnote.com
Recent Comments