The Unofficial Footnote Blog

Part 4 of 4

Annotation and Finding

When searching for data that has been OCR’d, you can often locate, once the page is in the viewer, with FIND. If the information has not been OCR’d or indexed, you may wish to make an annotation, so that you can find it more easily later.

ANNOTATION. When you find a listing, you can annotate it, and make it easier for you to find later. You could also save every directory page that you like to your gallery, perhaps in a folder that you name, “Frank F Sharbrough LA City Directories” so you can find them later. If course you could save them to your own computer, too.

FIND – maybe, maybe not. As a rule, when OCR text is involved, the snazzy Footnote viewer shows a FIND button in the toolbar at the top. It makes it easy to find where your Sharbrough is on the page. It’s VERY helpful with newspapers, or to find the Davises on the Vietnam Memorial. There are cases, and I saw a couple during this project, where the FIND button doesn’t appear. This means that Footnote staff considered the OCR quality for that page so bad that it is not available. This happens. I’ve suggested that they create a tool for volunteers to create such products, but it’s not an imminent development.

Psst! Hey Buddy! Over here! Wanna buy a Timeline?

One of the features of the Footnote site that I plan to write about someday are “Footnote Pages.” They are web pages, created by members and by staff. There is already a Footnote Page for Francis F Sharbrough, created by Footnote staff based on his entry in the SSDI. I could add these entries to it. I could, and I did. Further, if you saved the directory pages to your gallery, you could link to them as sources for your timeline. I could, and I did not. By entering some of these, I was able to determine that in 1905 Frank lived 7 blocks from work at the Broadway Dept Store. Here’s an example.

In this example, you can see the lollipops on the map, showing places that Frank lived and worked in LA. In the top right part, you can see the timeline for his life events. There are zooming and scrolling controls on both widgets, so you can drill down and see a long period of stability at a job, or back out and see the world events that happened in his life. I have to say that I kind of grinned at the idea that Frank might be in the Missing Air Crew Reports – a guy born in 1884 was almost 60 when WWII began for the US. Heck, FN recommends that I look for my grandmother in there! She was born 7 years after Frank, and passed away a year before he did.

Summing it up

By searching for information in city directories, you can learn a lot about a person’s life. You can watch them move around town, and you can tell how far they lived from work. If the directory listing isn’t indexed so that FN Search brings it up, you can still find it, relatively quickly and easily. Afterward, if you like, you can create a Footnote Page to help you analyze the findings further.

Last tip: these city directories didn’t include an address for the employer. You can look those up in the directory, or try google. I was able to find a picture of the Broadway Department Store from 1912 on Flickr, and was able to view a satellite image of 502 E 21st St on Google Maps. Now I feel like I’ve got enough information to have a deeper appreciation of the life that Frank made in LA. And I still don’t know much about him!