Fold3 HQ

Look for us this month at one of these conferences. Stop by one of our booths and say hi, ask questions, give feedback. We love talking to you.

• IAJGS– July 11-16 Los Angeles, CA
• Conference on Family History and Genealogy – July 27-30 Provo, UT
• Sons of the Confederate Veterans Annual Conference July 21-24 Anderson, SC
• Midwest Family History Expo July 30-31 Kansas City, MO

In recognition of America’s Independence Day, Footnote is opening their Revolutionary War Collection free to the public. This unique collection features millions of original records found nowhere else on the internet.

Whether you are a genealogist or history buff, you can discover new details about the American Revolution with records found on Footnote.com. American Revolution records on Footnote.com include:

• Soldier Service Records
• Original letters written by Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, and other Founding Fathers
• Revolutionary War Pension Files
• Payment Vouchers for Military Pensions
• George Washington Correspondence
• and much more

Search the American Revolution Collection today.

Today we have opened our entire U.S. Civil War Collection for free to the public for the entire month of June. For the past three years we have worked with the US National Archives to create the largest repository of Civil War documents on the web featuring over 30 million documents, photos and maps.

The original documents found in this collection provide a different perspective of the “war between the states”. Major events as well as accounts from individuals are brought to life on our Civil War page. You will find the following records in our Civil War collection:

• Union and Confederate Soldier Service Records
• Widow’s Pension Files
• Emancipation Documents and Slave Records
• Confederate Amnesty Papers and Citizen Files
• Lincoln Assassination Investigation and Trial Papers
• US Civil War Photos and Maps

Our collection is not just a repository of records, we also incorporate community contributions and interactions to enhance these documents. Many of registered Footnote users have added comments, insights and information that significantly increase our understanding of these events and the people involved.

We had a great time meeting and talking to everybody at NGS last week. We enjoyed the many questions, suggestions and ideas everyone had. We love finding out how we can make Footnote.com better and we regularly update Footnote to make it easier for you to do your research.

If you signed-up for the first time, we welcome you, if you extended your membership, thank you. The best of luck to all of you with your research.  If you need some help with footnote visit our new video tutorials page.

Everyone that signed-up for a membership during the conference was entered to win a lifetime membership or the Fezzari Mountain Bike. Here are the winners:

Lifetime All-Access Membership Winners:

• Day 1: Darlene G.
• Day 2: Mary S.
• Day 3: Alma D.
• Day 4: Joy T.

Grand Prize Fezzari Bike Winner:

• Shari K.

Over the past while, we’ve had the opportunity to present classes about Footnote and talk to people at our booth in the vendor areas at many expos sponsored by Family History Expos.  A couple of weeks ago, at their event in St George, Utah, we heard the sad news about some recent troubles they’ve had.

On February 20, 2010, Family History Expos website was destroyed by a fire suppression accident in the data center that housed their servers.  Without a site, no one was able to get information about or register for their expos.  Their new website, while still a work in progress, is coming along nicely and you can now visit the site to register to receive their free E-news and Tips.

This year there will be Expos from California to Atlanta and many places in between. Information on each Expo will be coming online as soon as possible. For more information, see their website at http://www.fhexpos.com/

We are reporting live from the St. George Family History Expo. We have had a great first day talking to everyone and getting to hear some great family history stories and experiences. We love to hear from you about what you like and what we can improve on our site. Thank you for all the support. We’ve seen some familiar faces and new ones and are enjoying every minute. Everyone has been super nice and positive. We hope anyone here can come visit us at our booth (Booth #208) and talk about family history with us.

We had a class lecture on “Everything You Wanted to Know About Footnote.com” today at 4:30 in the afternoon. Tomorrow we are going to be speaking again at 1:00 p.m. in the Entrada – BC  lecture room on “How to Best Search and Browse Footnote.com Content”. This will be a great class to learn some tips on how to best search the 63 million images on Footnote.com.

Tomorrow will be another great day. We will be here to answer all your questions and concerns. Let us know what historical collections you’d like to see added to Footnote.com. And don’t forget about the prize drawing at the end of the day. Footnote.com will be giving away a total of 3 annual memberships.

Here at Footnote HQ, we’ve been working on some ways to improve the image viewing and browse experience.

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.