Lindon, UT (May 10, 2011) – Footnote.com is pleased to announce the first online publishing of the War of 1812 Pension and Bounty Land Warrant Applications. In cooperation with the Federation of Genealogical Societies (FGS) and the National Archives, Footnote.com is currently digitizing millions of War of 1812 records and making them available on its site free of charge. The initial 1,400 images are available today and the collection will continue to grow weekly as the digitization process progresses. When completed, the collection will encompass 7.2 million images that will detail the histories of soldiers who fought in the War of 1812 and their families.

While the project is currently underway, its long term completion is dependent on the availability of additional funding. FGS is proud to be spearheading a national fundraising effort to ensure the completion and expedite this valuable endeavor. The organization is actively seeking donations from genealogical and historical societies, patriotic and military heritage societies, and any interested corporations or individuals. iArchives, Footnote.com’s parent company, is providing a dollar-for-dollar match of each donation through a provision of services. To learn more and contribute to the project, visit www.fgs.org/1812 or www.footnote.com/1812pensions.

“This is just the first step in a multi-year journey to bring the War of 1812 documents out of the National Archives and into the digital world,” said Brian Hansen, General Manager of Footnote.com. “We are privileged to bring such historically rich documents online, so they can be accessed in schools, libraries and homes where they can be available free for future generations.”

Footnote.com’s database of Revolutionary War Pension Files has proven to be the most popular set of records available on the site. It is anticipated that the War of 1812 Pension Application Files will create similar interest from family historians, genealogists and military researchers. The War of 1812 Pension Application Files include extensive details of the lives of these 19^th century veterans. The information may include:

• Veteran’s name
• Widow’s name
• Widow’s maiden name
• Service data and dates
• Age
• Acres Granted
• Year of Bureau of Land Management act
• Soldier death date
• Warrant number
• Place of residence
• Organization and Rank
• Marriage date
• Widow death date
• Additional names

About iArchives

iArchives is a leading digitization service provider and subsidiary of Ancestry.com (NASDAQ: ACOM). The company operates Footnote.com, the leading U.S. military record resource on the web with more than 72 million records online. The site provides searchable original documents, providing subscribers with a view of the events, places and people in the conflicts that shaped the American nation and the world. For more information, visit www.footnote.com.

About FGS

The Federation of Genealogical Societies (FGS), founded in 1976, links the genealogical community by serving the needs of its member societies, providing products and services needed by member societies, and marshaling the resources of its member organizations. FGS represents the members of hundreds of genealogical societies and engages in projects that help genealogical societies strengthen and grow as well as call attention to records preservation and access issues. FGS can be found on the web at www.FGS.org.

About the National Archives

The National Archives and Records Administration, an independent federal agency, is the nation’s record keeper. Founded in 1934, its mission is unique — to serve American democracy by safeguarding and preserving the records of our Government, ensuring that the people can discover, use, and learn from this documentary heritage. The National Archives ensures continuing access to the essential documentation of the rights of American citizens and the actions of their government. It supports democracy, promotes civic education, and facilitates historical understanding of our national experience. The National Archives meets a wide range of information needs, among them helping people to trace their families’ history, making it possible for veterans to prove their entitlement to medical and other benefits, and preserving original White House records. The National Archives carries out its mission through a nationwide network of archives, records centers, and Presidential Libraries, and on the Internet at http://www.archives.gov/.

We’ve received some great feedback from those of you who use the site and have tried to address the issues you’ve raised.

In the newer viewer, images should load faster, be easier to use and be more connected to the images around them.

Here are some of the specific things that should make image viewing better:

1. Improved “About image” panel contains image details, contributions others have made and an easy way to add your own insights.
2. Combined breadcrumb and browse make getting to other images faster and easier and we’ve added infinite browse columns to make browsing faster.
3. Floating toolbar includes all the old favorites plus fit and fill buttons and a new magnifier tool.
4. Annotation and spotlight displays will only show when your cursor is over them, so they don’t clutter up the image.
5. “Find in image” now searches everything in the “About” panel and any text that was indexed using Optical Character Recognition (OCR).
6. New “Share” options include popular sharing sites and links for embedding images on your own blog or website.
7. Updated filmstrip will show your zoom area, what’s been added to an image, whether or not it’s in your gallery and will even let you move around the image.
8. New next and previous buttons let you get to nearby images without using the filmstrip.

We aren’t quite ready to release these changes into the wild, but there is an early version of the viewer that we’ve been testing with our library users.  You won’t see all the improvements and some things have changed from this version, but you can take the library version for a test drive here.

We’ll post more details and tips for using the new viewer once it’s ready to go.

If you have comments, questions or suggestions regarding the image viewing experience on Footnote, please let us know.

Our plan is to start at 10 PM Mountain Time.  The maintenance should take about 3 hours and we’ll get the site back up as quickly as we can.

We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause.

With over 60 million historical records already online, Footnote.com will use the U.S. Census records to tie content together, creating a pathway to discover additional records that previously have been difficult to find.

“We see the census as a highway leading back to the 18th century,” explains Russ Wilding, CEO of Footnote.com. “This Census Highway provides off-ramps leading to additional records on the site such as naturalization records, historical newspapers, military records and more. Going forward, Footnote.com will continue to ad valuable and unique collections that will enhance the census collection.”

As more census decades are added to the site, visitors to Footnote.com can view the status for each decade and sign up for an email notification when more records are added to the site for a particular year.

View the Census Progress Page on Footnote.com.

In addition to making these records more accessible, Footnote.com is advancing the way people use the census by creating an interactive experience. Footnote members can enrich the census records by adding their own contributions. Users can:

• Add comments and insights about a person
• Upload and attach scanned photos or documents related to that person
• Generate a Footnote Page for any individual that features stories, a photo gallery, timeline and map
• Identify relatives found in the census by clicking the I’m Related button

“We will continue to move aggressively to add records to the site, specifically those that are requested by our members and others that are not otherwise available on the internet,” said Wilding.

The Interactive Census Project is now underway. Enjoy and interact with the project here.

This free 30-minute introduction to using Footnote covers:

• Records you’ll find on Footnote
• Searching Footnote
• Using the Footnote viewer
• Creating Footnote Pages

We do our best to make Footnote easy to use (and we’d appreciate any feedback that can help us get there), but there’s so much you can do on the site that a tutorial like this is a great way to get going.

Have a look at the webinar and the Getting the most out of Footnote page and let us know what you think in a comment here or through the Contact Footnote page.

Overwhelming traffic
The biggest problem is that we underestimated how fast word would get out and just how popular a free 1930 census would be.  The interest has overwhelmed our servers, which has made the Footnote experience slow, frustrating, error prone and pretty much the opposite of everything we work hard to make it.

We are doing what we can to improve the experience and will be upgrading our systems to handle more visitors, but this will take some time.  In the mean time, we expect that as the initial excitement dies down (or is dampened by the slowness of the site), things will improve.

If we can’t get things stabilized in the next few days, we will postpone the free 1930 offer until the systems are ready to handle it.  We hope we don’t have to do that, but we want you to be able to use the census while it’s free and we need to be sure that we provide a quality experience for our current paying members.

We’ll post additional updates about the status of the traffic problems here on the blog.

Confusion about how to get to the census for free
We’ve heard some reports about people having problems getting the free access. To get to the census for free, you have to go through the promotional page at http://go.footnote.com/1930census.  Going through this page allows us place a cookie that gives you special access to the 1930. Once you’ve got that cookie, as long as you are on the site, you should be able to search from anywhere on the site and get into the 1930 census free.  If you close the browser and come back, you’ll need to go back to the 1930 promotion page again.

Printing and downloading
For the first day or so of the promotion, we had an error on the site which was telling people they needed to subscribe in order to print or download one of the free 1930 images.  We fixed the problem earlier this week, so if you tried to print or download earlier, we hope you’ll try again.

With I Remember you can preserve, honor and share the memories of anyone who influenced your life -  your family, friends, classmates, teachers and celebrities.

I Remember includes millions of pages already created from public records including the Social Security Death Index and WWII Army Enlistment Records on Footnote.  It also includes thousands of pages Members have created on their own using information found on Vietnam and USS Arizona memorials, 1860 and 1930 Census or another images on Footnote.

You can learn more about I Remember here or try it out here.

We hope you’ll give it a try and let us know what you think. 

Tip:  To contribute to I Remember you need to be registered with Footnote (a free registered account).  If you already have a Footnote account, be sure to click “Already have a Footnote account?” on the second step of adding the application.  That way, you can use your current Footnote account with I Remember rather than create a new one.

View the video below:

Try a wildcard search now.

Mark Tucker, a mild mannered software architect by day, becomes a family historian and blogger in his free time.  At ThinkGenealogy he writes about everything from the intersection of genealogy and technology to sourcing and citation and provides fun and interesting family history related insights and the occasional puzzle.

Thanks Mark.  We’d love to repeat, so we’ll see what we can come up with this year.