I've spent two more hours working on Footnote Pages and in my Gallery on www.Footnote.com. I am a registered member on Footnote, but not a premium (read: subscriber) member, so I cannot access images that are behind the subscription firewall.
In these two hours, I've managed to:
* update my member profile - see http://www.footnote.com/profile/rjseaver/
* Add 11 pictures to my Gallery -
* Added Footnote Pages for:
** Lyle Lawrence Carringer (1891-1976) - my maternal grandfather
** Emily Kemp (Auble) Carringer (1899-1977) - my maternal grandmother
** Betty Virginia (Carringer) Seaver (1919-2002) - my mother
** Frederick Walton Seaver (1911-1983) - my father
I added birth, death, spouse and residence information for each of them, and linked them appropriately to each other. I also added stories for Lyle and Emily.
My observations from this effort include:
* Footnote is really pretty slow in performing any task. Very frustrating!
* Each person has to be linked to their family members - one at a time. Children to parents, brother to sister, etc.
* The data for each person has to be input separately - even if it is common with someone else's data (e.g., marriage data, residence data, etc.). These are "person" pages, after all.
* You can put "stories" in for any person. I just copied and pasted from my FTM database.
* You can put links to a web page on a person's page - I connected Lyle and Emily to their ahnentafel reports on my web page.
* You can upload pictures and link them to one or more persons. They all reside in the member's Gallery and can be found through Footnote's Search feature. Putting pictures on this web site is one way to "archive" your pictures.
* This is not a "family tree" type of program - it is a "person" program. It is difficult to move from one person to another in Footnote Pages.
* Using the Social Security Death Index to "seed" the Footnote Pages was almost an act of genius. It gives users a starting point.
* Any researcher can see these pages if they can find the Page for a specific person. A search on footnote for "Frederick Seaver" did not find the Footnote Page for my father, although his SSDI entry is for that name.
In my humble opinion, this Footnote Pages feature may not be as "great" as I thought it was going to be because of the Search issues and the speed of the web site. It does have tremendous potential for the future.
I have tried to search by SSN's also but have been unable, not sure if that is a feature of the system or not.
ReplyDeleteI agree with the slowness, and the fact of having to input everything multiple times esp. since we have GEDCOM's that have all this info, I put in feedback requesting some sort of mass update system possibly based off of GEDCOM, and valid SSN/SSDI information.