Wednesday, September 23, 2009

Footnote Pages Revisited - some questions

When the 1930 US census came out on www.Footnote.com in March 2009, I provided a three-post series titled Footnote.com's Great Depression Collection showing how Footnote.com had added Footnote Pages for each person in the 1930 census.

At the time, I wondered if Footnote.com would find a way to enable combining the Footnote Page created from the 1930 Census data with a Footnote Page created from one of the other "seedings" from the Social Security Death Index or World War II Army Enlistment Records databases. Apparently, there is still no way to do this, and it's possible to have three separate Footnote Pages for the same person.

When I checked Footnote.com today, I noticed several puzzling things:

I clicked on the "Pages" link in the top (light brown) menu bar, and I got this screen:




The screen above proudly claims that there are over 80 million "Foonote Pages" [sic] from U.S. government records (from the Social Security Death Index and World War II Army Enlistment Records).

Huh? What happened to the 130 million "U.S. Government Records" that comprise the 1930 United States Census? Shouldn't the proud web page headline say "over 200 million" and include the 1930 Census records?

I put my father's name in the search box and found both Footnote Pages created for him. Here is the 1930 U.S. Census Footnote Page for Frederick W. Seaver:




On the above Footnote Page, I have added a Link to the other Footnote Page for my father, Frederick Seaver, which was created from the Social Security Death Index and includes photos, vital records and stories about my father - shown below:




So it seems that nothing much has changed here in six months.

I do really like Footnote Pages, and I hope that Footnote.com will continue to "seed" the collection with other U.S. Government databases (I suggest the 1790, 1820, 1850, 1880 and 1900 census records, the Revolutionary War, War of 1812 and Civil War Military Service records - that would take the collection back to the Revolutionary War time) to make it easy for Footnote users to add person details and other records to Footnote Pages.

However, I do think that Footnote.com needs to find a way to combine separate Footnote Pages for the same person.

2 comments:

kinfolknews said...

Randy,
I couldn't agree more that "Footnote.com needs to find a way to combine separate Footnote Pages for the same person". It is very annoying to have several Footnote Pages for one person! Are you listening Footnote.com??
~Regina

Elizabeth O'Neal said...

I guess that either my ancestors are so obscure that they only have 1 page, or I just haven't noticed any others. If there are more out there, that would really defeat the purpose of having "person pages."