I’ve been a subscriber off and on to footnote (see link below) for the past year or so.  Here are the basics:

http://www.footnote.com

Their twist is that they allow you to annotate or “footnote” images on their site.

An annual membership is $69.95 and their monthly rate was recently upped from $7.95/mo. to $11.95/mo.  If you’d like to purchase a single image, it’s $1.95/image. 

My first question when thinking about this review was, why have I been a member off and on? One reason is that I also subscribe to ancestry as well as a few other sites with a substantial amount of content. When I first came across footnote, it was because of the full Revolutionary War pension files they had. Those images and the ability to browse/search the originals drew me in and I found this invaluable. However, there just aren’t that many of those related to my personal research to justify an annual subscription.  I also browsed the Texas birth/death certificates, but now the death certificates can be found for free at http://pilot.familysearch.org. 

They are building up a wide range of newspaper images and city directories which will be very valuable. One opportunity for improving the city directories is to improve the search. Many of the directories just have “” after the first person with a given surname.  So, when, say, I search for Wm Sherwood in the 1923 Washington DC directory; the first result is for Wm. S. Sherwood who is at the top of a page. I’m looking for Wm H. Sherwood, but because HIS listing would be “” Wm H; this appears much further down the search results.

Once you’ve done a search and found documents of interest, Footnote DOES allow you a “Quick Look” at selected sections of the document you are interested in which I do like very much; it is free as well.

Footnote has also recently added a large collection of your own images; you can contribute your own genealogical/family history documents which should also prove valuable!

With all this, you should definitely check them out for a month to see what you can find as you will find something! They used to offer a free 3-day trial, but I don’t see this anymore (please correct me if I’m mistaken)!

As for what would get me to be an annual subscriber?

I’d love footnote to continue with the pension applications in full; these aren’t found anywhere else online to my knowledge. I understand why they started with the Rev. War, one reason being that since this is older than the War of 1812, etc., there are probably going to be more living descendants and thus potential customers from the Rev. War. But, full applications, from the War of 1812, Civil War (including Confederate pensions), etc. would be much appreciated! Just as with the Revolutionary War applications, there is substantial genealogical data to be found here that you likely can’t find anywhere else.

State census records; particularly from around 1890 as the US Federal census was virtually destroyed, would be very useful.  Very often, these records list County of birth or length of time residing in the town; things which are not found on Federal returns. Ancestry does have some images from state census records, but it is not complete. Perhaps a concentrated effort to collect any information from the 1890 time frame would be valuable.

Continue to flesh out the newspaper collections; I love to scour these for birth announcements, obituaries, on so forth.

Tax records! I’m not sure what access there is to even “modern” tax records or returns (say, pre-1930). But, for areas where early census returns have been lost; original images would be invaluable.

Ok, I’m sure there’s a lot more, but anyway; again, I do like the site. I love the original Rev. War applications and can’t wait for them to flesh out some of their other collections.

 

Thoughts?

Pat