Mexican War Service Records contain valuable first-hand information about battles, troop movements, officers, and soldiers. While the United States had a standing army at the time, most of the soldiers who fought in the Mexican War were volunteers from various states. At present, there are five sets of records on Fold3 with information on forty-four units, and the men who served in them, from Mississippi, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Texas, and the Mormon Battalion.

Muster Rolls provide details on Promotions, Payments, Casualties, Those killed in battle and deserters, as well as physical descriptions. Unit information includes company muster rolls naming recruits, deserters, and those on special assignment; and regimental returns with battle histories and casualties. Company locations—the National Palace Mexico, Lobas Island in the Gulf of Mexico, and Camp nr. Jalapa Mexico—provide geographic perspectives.

Other titles on Fold3 round out the Mexican War Collection. If you’re interested in a Pennsylvania soldier, alphabetical service record abstracts in the Pennsylvania Archives match the imaged service record cards within the state’s two regiments. For Mormon Battalion soldiers, you can pair service records with the Mormon Battalion Pension Files.

Explore the Mexican War Service Records to learn more about the men who served in this geographically critical war.

Members Of The Crew Of The Boeing B-17 "The Bad Penny" Are Interrogated After Their Return From A Mission Over Enemy Territory.

Thank you to everyone who has responded so passionately with comments and questions about the change from Footnote to Fold3. The fact that so many have responded is a positive reminder that many of you have grown to love the site and the content we offer. It would have been much more discouraging if no one had cared. Here is some additional clarification to address some of the concerns we’ve seen posted:

1. Many have voiced concern about what will happen to the non-military content on Fold3. We have not removed any non-military content from the site and we have no plans to remove any non-military content from the site (except possibly some newspapers from content partners who may choose to have their content removed in the future, unrelated to the Fold3 launch). Everything that was on Footnote two days ago and earlier is still accessible today.
2. There has been concern about whether or not we will add non-military content in the future. There are some ongoing commitments to produce non-military records, like Homestead Records for example, that will continue to be added to the site even though they are not military records. But the clear focus for new content will be military records. We understand that many of our users love the naturalization records, vital records, census records and city directories found on the site – and all of those we’ve produced will continue to be available on Fold3; but our parent, Ancestry.com, has a fantastic site with an enormous number of naturalization records, vital records, census records and city directories already available and many more being added constantly. We encourage everyone to visit the Ancestry.com site for records beyond what we have on Fold3. There is a very, very large number of military records yet to be digitized and made available online and we are increasing our investment in content production to accelerate the pace of content growth on the site. By focusing on military records, we know we may disappoint some users who wanted to see another copy of US Census records produced or additional city directories, and so on; but we believe we are more likely to succeed at exceeding users’ expectations if we clearly communicate our focus and stick to it rather than trying to excel in creating an optimal user experience for dozens of different types of records.
3. Users have asked why they weren’t notified of the change in advance. Notification of members is underway already and emails will continue to be sent over the coming days (it takes a while to send as many email messages as we are sending); so if you haven’t received one yet, you should have it in your inbox soon. We appreciate your patience and are happy to answer any questions you may have.
4. Some have wondered what might become of non-military memorial pages and user-uploaded content. All memorial pages and user-uploaded content remains as it was before, meaning that there are tens of millions of non-military memorial pages on the site and we have no plans to limit future memorial pages or user uploads to just military content.
5. A few comments have wondered whether Ancestry.com would move all of its military content to Fold3. There are no plans to remove any military content from the Ancestry.com site. While there are some military record collections that make sense to have on both Fold3 and Ancestry.com (like the World War II Old Man’s Draft Cards that we just started adding to Fold3), the content on the Fold3 site has always been mostly distinct content that could not be found on Ancestry.com and that will continue to be true. When we selectively add content from the Ancestry.com site to Fold3, we will be making a separate copy available on Fold3 and not removing the content from Ancestry.com. Similarly, there are some cases where it may make sense for Ancestry.com to selectively copy vital records or other content from Fold3 to Ancestry. But the vast majority of content on each site will continue to be distinct rather than overlapping.
6. Other comments have related to whether or not existing partnerships or integration points would continue to function as they do currently, with the FamilySearch integration being mentioned in a couple comments for example. All existing links and integration points are still functioning as they did previously (although it will take some time for all of the text on various sites to be changed from Footnote.com to Fold3). We have no plans to remove any of the linkages between FamilySearch and Fold3 and are very happy with that integration and similar integration points with other sites.

We understand that the change from Footnote to Fold3 is dramatic and that it is very uncomfortable for some users. We hope you will find that the same team that created what you loved under the Footnote brand will bring you content and features you love just as much under the Fold3 brand. We appreciate your support.  If you have any account specific questions please visit our Contact Page.

Our new plan is to start at 12 AM Mountain Time, Monday, March 28 and finish by 4 AM. Again we apologize for any inconvenience this may cause.

Original Post:
Tomorrow night (Wednesday, March 23 over Thursday, March 24) we will be doing some maintenance work and the site will be unavailable for about 4 hours. 

We plan to start around midnight Mountain Time, and, all going well, should have things back up and running Thursday morning by about 4 AM Mountain Time.

We know there is no convenient time to have the site down and we apologize for any trouble this causes.  Hopefully the extra sleep you can get will be something of a silver lining.

We created Spotlights to be a way you could quickly highlight and share your discoveries.

Spotlights don’t have to be of famous people or well-known events. They just have to be something that’s important to you – a document about an ancestor, historical newspaper article, or just something that made you laugh.

Recently, we started thinking about how to improve Spotlight pages.

We focused on making the page simpler, easier to share and providing more source information.

Some more improvements:

Larger and simpler layout

People love bigger pictures so we increased the size of the Spotlight by 50% on the page. Gives greater emphasis to you your discovery. The right column shows who made the spotlight, the number of views and comments. You can also see the small thumbnails of the last 5 Spotlights by that Footnote member.

Spotlighting sets it Free

When you create a Spotlight from a Premium document it becomes free for everyone that visits the document through that Spotlight. So you don’t have worry about your family or friends not having an All-Access membership to Footnote. Just share it.

By the way, sharing that Spotlight is easier now, too. Send your Spotlight via Facebook, Twitter, email and other social bookmarking websites. In addition, you can easily embed Spotlights on any website or blog using the code supplied in the column.

The Source, of course

Sourcing a document is important. Spotlights automatically show, if known, where the document came from and how it has been categorized on the site.

Move your mouse over the source and you will see a search box that lets you find more images from a specific collection and links to browse more.

More to come

Over the next few months we’ll be trying out some additional tweaks to the new design. There are a few items missing that we’d like to add, and a few more we’d like to enhance. We hope you enjoy the updated Spotlights. Here’s the some of the most popular Spotlights on Footnote this week.

From what we can tell, things should be pretty much back to normal.  If you are still having problems, please let us know with a comment here or by sending and email to support@footnote.com.

We’re still working to improve the speed of the site and we will continue to upgrade our systems to try to avoid something like this happening again.

We’d like to apologize again for the issues we ran into last week and thank you for your patience as we worked through them.

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.

But with the tremendous growth in search traffic on the site, we realized months ago that we needed more horsepower.

For example, our 1930 US Census project alone will add 120 million new people and more than 3 million images.

Starting early this week, we began upgrading our search engine. But it’s a feat akin to trying to swap out your 4-cylinder engine with a V8 while driving down the highway at 65 mph.

As a result, some of you noticed some sluggishness in searches – some bumps in the road.

The good news is that the first phase went live today without a problem (20:05 GMT).

Although, we’re still cruising down the highway, it will be a few more days before we get firing on all cylinders.

Once that’s complete, what does all this effort this mean for you? You should see:

• Quicker search results.
• New content and Member contributions will be findable almost as soon as they are added.
• More historical content added to Footnote will not affect search performance.

We know there will probably be a few hiccups as we fine tune this new engine and apologize in advance for any inconvenience.

Please continue to kick the tires and let us know of any issues you find.

Thanks.

It seemed to be something that only happened with certain browsers under certain conditions, so it took some sleuthing, but we found a few things that were plugging up the works.

Last week we rolled a fix that should speed up the site for folks who were having the problem.  Most of the changes happened behind the scenes, but there is one feature that we decided to give up in pursuit of speed.  We removed the “Report an error” links that were under each search result because some browsers were having trouble with them and also because it didn’t look like they were being used.

We’d like it to be easy for people to let us know about errors with the information on the site, because we’re eager to fix them.  We appreciate the great feedback from people contacting us or leaving comments on the site about errors that they’ve found.

If you find errors on the site, the best way to let us know about them is to use the “Contact Footnote” link at the bottom of most pages or the “Flag for review” links that you’ll find in the viewer, on Footnote Pages and Spotlights and in other areas of the site.  The more information you can provide about the error, the better.

Often, when there is a problem, people annotate the correct information where it appears on an image.  This is a great short term fix because those additions will show up in search the next time that image is indexed–usually a day or two.  Even after we fix the error, the annotation makes that information easier to locate on an image.

Commenting on an image isn’t the best way to send us a correction because we may not see the comment and once we make the correction, the comment will be out of date, but we’ve received some great corrections through comments and we appreciate people taking the time to add them.

Thanks again to everyone who sends us feedback of any kind.  Without it, we might never have known about the slowness or many of the errors that have now been corrected on the site.  It’s great working with you to make Footnote better.

The new search is useful because it provides an effortless way to narrow your results.

It does this by using an approach commonly referred to as “guided” or “faceted” navigation specifically tailored to your search results.

What does that mean for you? It means that clicking on any facet, like a Title or Collection, will always give you results. Many might think this is an easy feature to implement, but it is not. It requires a lot of smart software, better metadata and lots of computing power.  But instead of reading more about it, why not check out this 4-minute introduction:

Image Adjustment
We do all we can to get the best quality images on the site, but sometimes the condition of the source images we have (microfilm, microfiche, paper) leaves us with digital images that are hard to read. In some cases, there isn’t much that can be done, but with most of these images, inverting the image or adjusting the brightness or contrast can bring out details that make all the difference.

Here’s an extreme example of an image that is difficult to read:

Here’s the same image with some adjustment to the brightness and contrast:

Here it is again with the colors inverted and the brightness and contrast adjusted:

These image adjustments aren’t magic and can’t make every image readable, but they can make a big difference if you are having trouble making out a word or some other detail from a document. Invert is particularly handy when the original image is a negative, like this example from the Marine Corps Vietnam photos.

In addition to the image adjustment tools, we’ve improved the “Find” tools for searching text within an image and updated the filmstrip to make it clearer where one document ends and the next begins.

Improved Navigation
One other change worth noting is the update we made to the headers across the site. The new design should make it easier to get around the site, use search and browse, access your account and profile items and remember the last 4 images you viewed (“Your Recent Activity”).

As always, we hope you’ll try these new features and let us know what you think.