HAPPY BIRTHDAY

In three years, more than 60 million pages have been published. The indexes are fully searchable for free. Much of the content is free as well. Most of the 60 million images are unique to the web, not available anywhere else. And there is even more data stored in “Footnote Pages” that includes the Social Security Death Index.

The contributions of the user community is not as large as was originally imagined. Don’t confuse quantity with quality, though. There are some priceless additions, as well as enhancements to the search index, from users. It is safe to say that Footnote’s social media offerings have been accepted well by their users, and that the level of user contribution is not matched elsewhere in their industry. (I wouldn’t want to have a debate about user contributed family trees, which are abundant elsewhere, and not on the Footnote site. It’s not their industry?) User photos and comments are richer than I have seen on competitive sites.

Congratulations to the folks at Footnote for reaching a milestone.

And now … the other shoe. I have only two questions.

1. Where is the soundex search?
2. Where is the fielded annotation?

WHY IS SOUNDEX IMPORTANT?

Sometime in the first month of researching historical individuals, whether famous or simply family, one discovers that the records don’t spell the name the same way. Ergo, finding all of the records for a person means finding records that have “variant expressions” of the name – that say Jim and not Jimmy, that say Sharber and not Sharbrough, and so on. If customers are limited to searching for exact matches, they will overlook records which have been accurately transcribed and indexed, but which don’t say what they expected.

Footnote has addressed this somewhat, by supporting a wild-card search. I can look for “Sharb*” and see all of the Sharbers and Sharbroughs. I can use “K*tzm*” to find Katzman, and Kartzmus, which are sometimes the same person. But success in that endeavor requires the customer to not only know HOW to use the wild cards, but WHEN to use them.

Further, many researchers have experience with Soundex and understand that it provides “near misses” or “close matches.”

By this point in time, one might have expected a “ranked search” feature on the site. Is is unreasonable for customers to ask for enhancements to search?

WHAT IS FIELDED ANNOTATION?

Since launch, Footnote has supported “annotation” of the images on the site. It’s a great feature. If you find a name in a newspaper, or an address, or an error, you can enter it. The problem is, user annotations are keywords. They are not added to the database. If you search on last name, you won’t find annotations. If you search on first name, you won’t find user annotations. If Footnote produced the document using OCR (optical character recognition, a form of “machine reading”), the data goes into keywords, and can’t be searched using the search refinement features for names, places, and years.

Footnote customers might want to pass on their congratulations to the company for the things that they’ve accomplished to date. They might also want to let them know how Footnote might be made more useful. I’ve made two suggestions here. Do you have others?

While I said sure, the project didn’t proceed past that point during my tenure there. But this week, the account books of the Deseret Iron Company were published on the footnote site. There are 551 pages, organized by year, and month, and page number. The page numbers are a continuous sequence – 1854 starts on page 1 and 1855 on page 21.

There wasn’t a lot of cash around, and employees were paid on account. These books tell a great deal about pioneer life in the area that later became Cedar City.

I’m not familiar enough with the records or the history to say why the gap exists between 1862 and the final year, 1867. Let’s speculate that the company ceased operation in 1862 and cleared up the books five years later. Making it up is so much easier than research. That’s why 74% of genealogists do it.

Kudos to Footnote and SUU for publishing original images of a unique historical record. I don’t have any pioneer Utah miners in my family tree, but I think it’s the kind of publishing decision that gives the site value.

“%age” is the percentage complete, according to the website

“total pages” is the total images for that title when I last measured it (they can change at any moment).
“last week” is the change in the number of images since the last similar blog post.
“prev week” is the number of pages added in the previous week.

No new titles were added this week.

“%age” is the percentage complete, according to the website

“total pages” is the total images for that title when I last measured it (they can change at any moment).

“last week” is the change in the number of images since the last similar blog post.

No new titles were added this week. The %age for the GA Civil War Soldiers ticked over to 100.

Two months later, we still don’t know for sure. But we do know what has been published since. Here is that report.

CENSUS PUBLISHED

In the past two months, pages have been added to four census titles on Footnote.

• 1930. Added 3,158 pages. Approximately 1,500 pages remain to be published.
• 1920. Added 19,164 pages. Over 2 million remain.
• 1910. Added 22,053 pages. About 1.7 million remain.
• 1900. Added 22,531 pages. More than 1.5 million remain.

I’m sure that Footnote will not proceed at this pace. The one thing that is for sure is that things will change. But for the sake of explaining the remaining work, let’s calculate the number of months that it would take to finish these titles at the current pace. The 1930 census is effectively completed, so I’ll eliminate it from the calculations. Based on 8 weeks of production, here are the numbers.

• 1920. Average 3194/wk. 643 weeks to go.
• 1910. Average 3676/wk. 471 weeks to go.
• 1900. Average 3755/wk. 487 weeks to go.

Please don’t think that Footnote will take 9 years to finish the 1910 census, or 12 years to finish 1920. They will most likely speed up. One of the interesting things to learn in 2010 is how much they do speed up. There are about 5 million pages in earlier census years that haven’t started to hit the site yet.

OTHER TITLES – HOW ARE THEY DOING?

Since the census announcement, Footnote has added at least 1,000 pages to each of the following titles:

Census – US Federal 1900
Census – US Federal 1910
Census – US Federal 1920
Census – US Federal 1930

Civil War Soldiers – Union – MO
Texas Death Certificates
Naturalizations – NY Eastern
Naturalizations – NY Southern
City Directories – Toledo
Civil War Soldiers – Union – KY
City Directories – Minneapolis
Civil War “Widows’ Pensions”
WWII Captured German Records
Approved – Alabama
Approved – Virginia
Massachusetts Vital Records
Massachusetts Vital Record Transcripts
Dachau Entry Registers
City Directories – New Orleans
Homestead Records
City Directories – New York
City Directories – Detroit
WWII Nuernberg Interrogation Records

News – Poughkeepsie Journal
News – Fort Wayne News (IN)
News – Florida Today

Notes

Newspapers sent by Small Town Papers don’t compete for scanning and indexing resources with other titles.

Census titles comprised about 65,000 pages. The three newspapers, about 60,000.

Total production was just over 1.25 million pages.

In other words, for the first two months after the announcement, census publication was 65,000 out of 1.25 million pages, or about 5%. With annual production at about 10 million pages, we would expect to see about 500,000 pages of census material at that pace. My guess is that it will be somewhat higher.

Who knows what the next progress report will show?

“%age” is the percentage complete, according to the website

“total pages” is the total images for that title when I last measured it (they can change at any moment).

“last week” is the change in the number of images since the last similar blog post.

One new title was added this week, “Homestead Records.” It’ s not clear how it compares to “Homestead Records – Broken Bow, Nebraska” which was published previously. The description says that the records are from “various land offices in Nebraska.” You might imagine it as being titled, “Homestead Records – other land offices, Nebraska” but that’s a bit verbose, I’ll admit.

Happy New Year!

“%age” is the percentage complete, according to the website

“total pages” is the total images for that title when I last measured it (they can change at any moment).

“last week” is the change in the number of images since the last similar blog post.

No new titles were added to the site this week. Several newspapers have been added to the list, but no pages have been published for them yet. It’s a bit of a short week – I would normally wait another day to complete a week of production, but perhaps we’ll have a long week somewhere down the line.

Have a wonderful holiday season!

The appearance of the list has changed significantly. I’ve taken the time to put the list into a table, instead of a straight text list. You might find it easier to scan. The list might have contained some duplicates before. I made an effort to minimize those this time.

As I said last time, next time, I may add the “% complete” from Footnote. I may. It could happen.

Oh, and I changed the publication date for the post. If you have been saving a link to the old list, I might have broken it. I’m amazed at how impermanent a permalink can be.

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 up into multiple parts. EX: M1164.

This list is updated manually, on a random schedule. Most recently, 19-Oct-2009.

NOTE: * indicates a title added since the previous update to this list. The words FREE, NEW, and UPDATED were on the site at the time of the update, but as was stated above, this list is updated randomly. Footnote changes these things as they may, and you might find a different status when you visit the site.

“%age” is the percentage complete, according to Footnote at the time I updated the list.