The Unofficial Footnote Blog

Years ago, when I was working at Footnote, I got a call from a librarian at Southern Utah University. She wondered if we might publish a single roll of microfilm that the library owned. The roll contained the account books of the Deseret Iron Company.
While I said sure, the project didn’t proceed past that [...]

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Below, please find a list of NARA titles on Footnote.com, sorted by NARA Microfilm Publication Number. This page was previously maintained as a page on the Footnote site, but I can control the appearance better here.
You might notice that some titles appear more than once. Due to differences in the internal content, theyhave broken some [...]

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Two quick lists for today.
The 10 titles which are 100% complete, containing less than 1000 images

Photos – WW II Japanese FREE
Civil War Soldiers – Union – UT
Ardelia Hall Collection: Wiesbaden Photographs FREE
Custer’s Court Martial FREE
Constitutional Convention Records FREE
Foreign Letters of the Continental Congress FREE
Photos – Coolidge FREE
Photos – Eisenhower FREE
Amistad – Federal court records FREE
Town [...]

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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.

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Part 3 of 4
Here’s what worked
When I worked at Footnote, I used to routinely pester Peter Drinkwater about the shortcomings of the browse experience. Peter was kind enough to listen to me, and he used to tell me that they weren’t likely to do anything with browse because Search enhancements were going to replace it.
I [...]

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Part 2 of 4
I had problems
I had searched the LA city directories for Francis Sharbrough, but I was pretty sure that half of the entries were not OCR’d properly, and would require a browse to find the page for the Sharbroughs. It was a good idea, even if it wasn’t very practical.

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Part 1 of 4
It’s not a secret. I’m a big fan of City Directories. Footnote has a lot of them. But it’s not always as easy to find what you’re looking for as one might wish. I’ve spent some time fooling with this, and I have some suggestions for you.
I have a very distant cousin [...]

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This past week, Footnote announced a “Great Depression Collection.” The content was identified as the Population Schedules from the 1930 US Federal Census, and historical newspapers from the period. The newspapers have been on the site for some time previously, but that’s a common marketing approach to which Footnote is not immune. Re-branding and re-launching [...]

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Just about once a week, I stumble over something at Footnote, the existence of which I had not previously inkled. At such times, I inkle really fast for a while. You might be aware that Footnote went live, in January 2007, with five titles:

The Pennsylvania Archives
The Papers of the Continental Congress
The Organizational Index to Civil [...]

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Footnote has service records, pension files, newspapers, and government correspondence from the War Between The States. There are even photographs. If you know your civil war ancestor, you are likely to find something about them here.

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