Wish for Footnote.com

I like Footnote.com.

The search allows me to "eliminate OCR results." I like that. An option I would also like to see if the ability to eliminate results from the SSDI and the user created pages. Sorry sometimes I don't need the recent stuff and I want to focus on original records. Just my personal preference. I get tired of wading through all that other stuff.

1930 Census Mary Trautvetter and her neice

I've been doing a little playing with Footnote.com this month while they are offering free access to their 1930 census. This entry is for a family that will appear in an upcoming "Casefile Clues" column.

Maxine's guardianship over ten years before this census was contested all the way to the Illinois Supreme Court. There were so many documents in the file that I had to stop scanning them when I was in Salt Lake at the Family History Library due to time constraints. Mary Trautvetter is a first cousin to my great-grandfather, George Trautvetter (1869-1934).

Downloading Revolutionary War Pensions at Footnote

While I was at the Family History Library in Salt Lake, I decided to spend some time downloading items from Footnote.com. The image shown here is part of the Revolutionary War Pension of Elam Blain. The likely New Jersey native served from that state and lived there and in Pennsylvania and Ohio. The images at Footnote.com come from the National Archives microfilm and are fairly nice images. The only drawback is that each image has to be downloaded separately. This pension file had approximately sixty images. Actually it only took me about ten minutes, which was not all that bad. We've discussed this pension file before and I had downloaded some of the images, but somehow deleted a few of them. This time I'll be more careful.

Wildcards at Ancestry and Footnote

Footnote.com lets searchers perform wildcard searches with just two initial letters. This is different from Ancestry.com which requires searchers to enter three initial letters before usign a wildcard character.

Footnote.com will allow searches of Ne*, Ni*, etc.
Ancestry.com allows searches of Nel*, Nei*, etc.

1930 Census at Footnote

Footnote.com's 1930 census index is now 84% complete. There are some neat features on this site, particularly the "I'm Related" part.










I searched for my wife's grandmother and located her relatively easily (I already knew where and when she was, so that part was not difficult).





There was a link for "I'm related" which I clicked on and which brought up the first screen shot seen in this post.





The next time someone else searches for Anna Apgar in the 1930 census at Footnote.com, they will see this screen when they click on the link for the one living in Chicago.



Pretty slick.



The images at Footnote.com (one is shown below) aren't too bad either.



And Footnote.com has a monthly and annual subscription rates that are pretty reasonable.

Footnote's 1930 Census and "omit" OCR searches

Footnote.com released it's 1930 census index and images today. Interactivity is higher here than with images at other sites. Some will love the interactivity. I'm pretty much a get in there and get the record kind of person--looking at adjacent pages too. I'm not certain how much time I would spend adding images and other sources to each entry for my ancestor.

My parents are not listed in the 1930 Census. My grandparents are, but I'll have to wait until 1950 until my parents are enumerated.

Those who like interacting with the census will really like the Footnote.com index to 1930 and will be pleased to hear they are adding more. More indexes online is always a good thing, but there are ways you can search at Ancestry.com you can't quite do at Footnote.com .

Footnote.com now as an option to "omit OCR searches" from search results. YEAH! There are a few more improvements I would like to see, but this is a step in the right direction.

Suggestion for Footnote

I really like Footnote.com and the images it currently has.

One suggestion I would like to see implemented is the ability to search all but ONE database (or all but two, etc.). For some searches one database or another seems to overwhelm the results and I'd like to search everything but one or two databases.

Just an idea.

Passport Applications on Footnote.com

Passport applications are an excellent source and one that is particularly helpful for searching on those extended family members. Passport Applications 1795-1905
are currently available on Footnote.com.

John Goldenstein was born in Wrisse, Gemany, 4 January 1876. He is a first cousin of my great-grandmother. His passport was dated 1905 and it indicated he had naturalized in Albuquerque in 1902. It also provided his date of immigration to the United States.

He had lived in Gothenburg, Nebraska; Sterling, Nebraska; Albuquerque, New Mexico; and Douglas, Arizona; since coming to the United States. The first two locations were areas where other family members were known to have lived. He was a 29 year old motorman on the application. The witness was L. U. Albers, a distant relative, who lived "out west" but I was unaware that Albers had spent time in the Southwest.

These images are pretty nice as well.

Too bad his uncle, Frank Goldenstein (my actual ancestor) never got a passport when he visited Germany in 1910.

Check out the applications for more than just your direct line ancestor. If I had not known where the Goldensteins were from, this would have been a very helpful document.

Those wishing to search the Passport Applications 1795-1905 can do so at Footnote.com.


(The first time this entry was published, I hit the publish key a little too fast and all that was published was the image.)

Uploading Your Own Content to Footnote

Remember that you can upload your own images to Footnote.com. You can set up an account at no charge.

I have uploaded the marriage license of my probable 3rd great-grandmother Mary Sargent to her second husband Asa Landon.

Uploading is free and users do not have to be subscribers to see the image. The nice thing is that annotations can be added just like fee-based content on Footnote. Those who have never used Footnote's image viewer might want to view the marriage license shown above and see how it works. It is pretty neat.

Remember that until the end of the year, Footnote.com is offering 15 months for the price of 12. Get the most for your family history dollar.

And any descendants of Mary Sargent and Asa Landon are encouraged to email me.

Discount on Footnote.

Footnote.com is offering a discount where users can get 15 months of access for the price of 12. This is a limited time offer. Footnote is a nice complement to other online subscriptions and we've written about it several times in the past. They have city directories, World War I era investigation files (particularly into German natives living in the United States), complete Revolutionary War pension files, and much more.

Another Suggestion for Footnote.com

I am still working in the city directories at Footnote.com . I have a suggestion.

There needs to be another way to browse the images in a dataset other than scrolling to the very end of moving ahead one or two sets of images. The Chicago city directories are well over a thousand pages each. My searches for "thomas frame" many times bring up no results and searches for "frame" bring up too many. Since the directories are alphabetical, I like to just go to the Frame section.

The problem is that because of the way the "paging through" works, it takes forever to get just to the "F" section. It could always be worse, but I wish there were a way to jump faster through the images when a text search does not work and one wishes to get to a specific page or area of the image set.

The "blank" Chicago city directory on Footnote.com

The last city directory in the "browse section" of Footnote for the Chicago city directories indicates it is [blank]. It appears to be at least two years of directories combined, perhaps more. I panned through several pages and the print looks different, seeming to indicate at least two directories have been combined in one entry. I did notice the following title pages (or at least what I thought were title pages:

• 1843
• 1867

Is anyone familiar enough with the Chicago city directories to know what years are in this "blank" set?

A Little More Framework in the Chicago City Directories

I've been doing a little more work on the family of Thomas and Elizabeth Frame in the Chicago City directories on Footnote.com.

Elizabeth is listed as "Mrs. Elizabeth Frame" who boards at 89 Cottage Grove Av. in 1869--see image. Thomas is not listed (and he's not in the 1870 Chicago census either).

Backtracking to 1868, Thomas appears, listed as a painter with a residence of 118 W Randolph.

Thomas nor Elizabeth appears in 1867 and this appears to be consisent with their 1870 census entry in Chicago, which indicates they had a child born in Pennsylvania ca. 1867.

There are no entries for Thomas or Elizabeth in the 1870 or 1871 directories. Thomas does appear as a painter again in 1872 apparently living between Barry and Cushing streets.

I need to follow through this family until their death in the 1910s. Also I need to map out these locations on contemporary maps. Mapquest is out of the question for these addresses that are prior to the renumbering and renaming that took place in the early 1900s.

Note:

All the current online city directories at Footnote.com can be searched here. You can browse the Chicago ones by year from 1843-1909. Feel free to post searching suggestions for the city directories here. You can see what other city directories Footnote.com has as well besides Chicago.You can also get a free trial with footnote.com if you do not already have a subscription.

Suggestions for Footnote.com

It's been a few months since I've actively searched on Footnote.com. They have added new databases, some of which I have been blogging about [note: I only blog about what I actually use--so take a look for yourself to see what they have for your time periods and areas of interest].

I like their search interface, but I do have three suggestions:

• Let us use wildcards--it is a pain in the rear to search for all the variants of Trautvetter--especially those that are "near misses" on the OCR searches.
• Let us use a soundex search.
• Let me "flag" those results I have seen before. This would save me time and help me find new things instead of things I have already found earlier.

Don't get me wrong, I like the site. But these options would give me more flexibility.

Chicago City Directories on Footnote.com

I've been working with the Chicago city directories online at Footnote.com. Footnote currently has Chicago directories online from 1843-1909.

All the current online city directories at Footnote.com can be searched here.

Or you can browse by year from 1843-1909. Personally this is the approach I am using as the last name I am looking for is "Frame." I get too much "stuff" that I do not want searching for just this word alone.


This is the screen that is shown in the image. If you choose the desired year, a search box should show up on the bottom of the page where you can search that specific directory. The nice thing about browsing by year is that it allows you to either search just the specific year you have browsed to, or you can view image by image. The screen shown in this posting would allow the user to search all Chicago city directories at once.




The second screen image shows I have clicked on the 1866 directory and after some navigating on the page section (notice I am at set 289 - 300 of 1612). I want page 415, which starts at T. M. Fox [the names might not be overly clear as I shrunk the image just a little bit to fit on this post--it is BIGGER when you actually search them yourself].





Turns out, good old Thomas Frame was not in Chicago in 1866.





However, skipping to 1880 (only to find him for an illustration)---I know I need to go year by year. I did find two Thomas Frames. The image from the directory is shown in this post.



This is really fun. And for those who want to go "page by page," like I do, don't complain about how long it takes. It takes a while to roll through the microfilm too. The only thing is that this works best on a high speed connection.

Feel free to post searching suggestions for the city directories here. You can see what other city directories Footnote.com has as well besides Chicago.

You can get a free trial with footnote.com if you do not already have a subscription.

Working With Chicago City Directories on Footnote

The image here is from the 1879 Chicago City Directory which is available on Footnote.com.

The desired person here is Thomas Frame. I'm having a little difficulty finding him by searches. Looking for "Frame" brings up numerous hits that I do not want. I am having more luck browsing the images and finding Thomas manually.

Thomas and his wife Elizabeth were English immigrants to Chicago and I am hoping to use the city directories on Footnote.com to track their residence in the city in off-census years and to perhaps pinpoint their arrival in Chicago. I know they arrived before the fire, but do not have a specific year.

Colonel Febucker in Virginia--Who is he?

This screenshot is the entire page from a Footnote.com image I have been working on for Samuel Rhodes. The reduced size shows the whole page and is discussed in more detail below.

The image showsn is part of the Revolutionary War Pension file for Samuel Rhodes from Virginia located on the Footnote.com site. I am having difficulty reading the name of the Colonel in whose regiment Rhodes served. It looks like Febucker, but I'm not certain that is correct.

I posted a comment there as well on the image. This will appear on the comments section of the page if anyone else pulls up the same image. They can see the comment I posted and if they have a different rendering of the name, they can post a comment to my comment. I really like the way the Footnote.com allows users to interact with the documents on their site.

Hopefully someone else can read the name in a different way or knows something about this Virginia unit.

Researchers can search Footnote.com for their own ancestors.

You can search the Revolutionary War Rolls on Footnote.com. I searched the Virginia set of Revolutionary War Pensions at Footnote.com , users interested in other stats can browse to those as well.

The Beta Test of Advanced Search at Footnote.com also allows for some narrowing of searching. Personally if I know what database I want to search, I start at the main Footnote.com site and navigate my way to the specific database I want.

And if anyone is a descendant of this Samuel Rhodes, I'd be interested in communicating.

OCR searches in Footnote

The newspapers at Footnote.com are searchable using OCR technology. The nice thing about the Footnote.com search results is that the highlighted text is shown (at least for some) in the results screen without requiring the entire image to be loaded.

I always search for Ufkes just to see what I find, it is one of the nice things about having an usual last name. In this case, the word "offices" came up, but one can see how an automatic search might recognize this as "ufkes." The nice thing is I can "preview" the page before waiting for the entire thing to load.

The London Times is one set of newpapers on Footnote.com that came from the Allen County Library in Ft. Wayne, Indiana.

Uploading Your Own Content to Footnote

I've been playing around with uploading my own content to Footnote.com. The marriage license for Asa Landon and Mrs. Mary Sargent from 1849 in Winnebago County, Illinois, was something I added to Footnote.com a few days ago.

Of course, I can make annotations for names and places, which I did. Comments can also be added. Site users can interact with uploaded images just like other Footnote.com content. Uploaded images can be viewed for free, even without an account. If you want to "interact" with user uploaded content, or upload your own, you'll need an account.

Those who want to see the Sargent-Landon marriage license on Footnote can do so here. It provides a nice overview of how one actually views and interacts with the site's content. And the nice thing is that if someone does a search for Asa Landon on the site, the image I loaded will be pulled up. If they are related to Asa, hopefully they will contact me.

Mary Sargent was the mother of an Ira Sargent (born. ca. 1845 in Canada). I am thinking this Ira Sargent may be the same as my Ira Sargent who first appears in Hancock County, Illinois, in 1880.

Making Connections at Footnote

I've been playing around with Footnote.com and am especially impressed with the connecting and networking capabilities this site offers.

One of the neat things you can do at Footnote.com is to connect documents with other documents on Footnote.com, either documents you have uploaded or records already on the site.

I found Elam Blain's pension records from the American Revolution when he was living in Ohio. After some searching, I found him on a muster roll in New Jersey, the state from which he served. I can link one document from the pension file to the muster roll. There does not appear to be one way to link his whole pension to the muster, but if another genealogist comes across page 56 from Elam's pension, they will see that document has been connected to another document. And if someone locates that page in the muster roll, they will see it has been linked to the pension file. Really neat. Imagine when more connections have been made.

I've posted a screen dump in this blog entry of the connection as shown (above) on my profile page at Footnote.com. Footnote.com members with a paid subscription can see the images using their account. Others will get a sign-in screen.

Footnote.com members who come across the muster roll for Elam will note that someone has made a connection with that page. This can be seen in the image of the roll, where to the right of the word "connect" you will notice the number 1, indicating one connection has been made. Neat.