Tuesday, September 16, 2008

Searching for Fred on Footnote

I must admit that I haven't revisited my Footnote Pages since my two posts last week - see here and here.

I wondered if my Footnote Pages and photographs had been indexed yet - and I wondered if Footnote Pages could be found from the main Footnote search engine.

I decided to see if my father's photographs and Footnote Page could be found by the Search engine. I input [Frederick Seaver] in the Search engine, as shown in the screen below, and clicked Search.


The Search resulted in 2,985 matches for my search query. Most of them were in the City Directories and News categories. I decided to look in the Category listing and saw that there were 2 entries in the "Member Contributed Images." The screen below shows this:


I clicked on the "Member contributed Pages" link and it showed my two photographs linked to Frederick Seaver in the Footnote database, as shown below:


I clicked on one of them, and saw the wedding photograph and the information about the photograph on the right, as shown below:


I clicked the "Annotations" and "Comments" buttons at the bottom right, but there was no information there. I could find no way to get to the Footnote Pages for Frederick Seaver that I had entered from the main Footnote Search box.

OK, I thought to myself. What about on Footnote Pages itself. I went back to the main Footnote screen and clicked on the "Try Me" in the Footnote Pages box. I entered [Frederick Seaver] in the Footnote Pages search screen as shown below:

This brought up two matches - one of which is my father's page and the other is a Social Security Death Index page for another Frederick Seaver.


I clicked on my father's Footnote Page, and the information I entered last week was there:


So to answer my two questions:

The Footnote main Search box finds photographs uploaded as part of Footnote Pages, but not the Footnote Page itself. The only way to find Footnote Pages is to use the Footnote Page box on the main Footnote web page.

I am not a Footnote subscriber. Everything I did on this post was free for me to perform - the searches are free, and access to Member Contributed Images and Footnote Pages is open to any researcher.

UPDATED 9:40 a.m.: My San Diego area genea-blogging colleague, X-Faith, has posted about Footnote Pages today on his Family History Tracing blog - here and here - he has some suggestions for Footnote to ponder.

Are X-Faith and I the only ones investigating and blogging about Footnote Pages?

Are they just a nice-to-have-and-search or a benefit to the genealogy community?

If nothing else, uploading photographs to Footnote are an excellent way to archive your old family photographs - and it's free.

3 comments:

MrDolomite said...

I haven't blogged about it, but have been playing with the new features. I'm a non-paying subscriber and so far, I'm not overly impressed. The search is sketchy and there should probably be more standard fields in the list of events. And linking people leaves much to be desired. It is good for a beta, but it is not going to make be spend my $$ becoming a member.

Xfaith said...

Thanks for the link back to my site Randy. Good to see that people read mine, I make it a probally more the daily habit to check out over here.

Thomas MacEntee said...

Randy

I have blogged about Footnote and I have a full subscription - the steps you outlined in terms of locating the Person Pages is correct and still holds for subscribers. I did not find it very easy to locate the page I set up for my great-grandfather last week.

I know that this feature was much-touted and talked about last week via press releases, FGS info etc, but I am beginning to have my doubts as to how useful this will be compared the what Geni can do with the same info.