Operation Valkyrie was a Hitler approved emergency scenario that set up the continuity of government and plan for the military if a general breakdown of civil order should occur, such as the Führer’s death.

On July 20, 1944, in an attempt to assassinate Adolf Hitler, Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg detonated a briefcase bomb at Hitler’s Eastern Front military headquarters, the Wolf’s Lair. Once Stauffenberg detonated the bomb, he believed Hitler to be dead. He rushed back to Berlin to initiate Valkyrie in order to take control of the government and the military with his fellow co-conspirators. The scene in Berlin quickly turned to chaos as conflicting reports about Hitler leaked to the military and Hitler’s colleagues.   Once Nazi officials were assured that Hitler was alive, Stauffenberg and his associates were immediately arrested and killed shortly after midnight that night.

Stauffenberg and his men came devastatingly close to ending the Third Reich, the Holocaust, and Hitler’s reign of terror, but an early end to the war was not meant to be. Instead, these men paid the ultimate price for their disloyalty to their Führer.

Otto Remer was in charge of the home guard for Operation Valkyrie.  You can read his account of the coup attempt in the WWII Military Studies.

The WWII Foreign Military Studies, 1945-54 includes reports, interviews, questionnaires and more regarding major operations and events of World War 2.

We want to thank everyone that participated in the Memorial Day Giveaway by using our Facebook application, I Remember to create and share Footnote Pages. Here is the list of our winners (listed by Footnote Membername):Grand Prize – Lifetime Membership to Footnote.com

• JanetHeatherly761

Daily Giveaway – Free Annual Membership to Footnote.com

• JosephSr
• DeannaLea124
• ShauunaWhite696
• djmartin
• Sossowicz
• BarbaraHagler70785
• mrskornegay1
• ChristinComstock868
• TinaMcKinney800
• TanyaCampbell143
• KatieOstrowski953

If winners haven’t received an email yet, they can claim their prize by emailing thomasj [at] footnote.com

The marketing guys were looking for a way to get the word out about the new I Remember Facebook application, so they opened the Marketing Playbook and found the chapter entitled “Give Stuff Away” and decided it was worth a try.

You can get all the details here, but the short of it is,

1. Use the I Remember application to create a page for someone
2. Share the page with your friends
3. 5 of them go to the page and click the I Remember button and remember that person
4. You’re entered to win a lifetime All-Access membership to Footnote

Only one lifetime membership will be awarded, but they are also giving away an annual All-Access membership each day between May 21 and the end of the month.

We hope you’ll find I Remember to be a great way to honor and share memories about the family, friends, classmates, teachers and others who have influenced your life.

Let us know what you think.

The Washington Times ran this story today about the Interactive Vietnam Wall in preparation for Memorial Day.Things have changed a little with The Interactive Wall since we released it last year. Contributions to someone on the Wall are now automatically added to a Footnote Person Page for that person,and those pages are also available in the new I Remember application on Facebook.Of course, Footnote Pages and I Remember aren’t limited to the Vietnam Memorial Wall. You can use them to share your remembrances of family, friends, classmates, teachers or anyone who has been important to you.You can search Footnote Pages here, create one here or start using I Remember here.Happy Memorial Day.Update: Photographer Peter Krogh writes about working on The Wall Project for Footnote.

Last week we unveiled the I Remember application for Facebook.  Because I Remember pages are linked to Footnote Pages, contributions made on either site will show up in both places.  For those of you who use Facebook, I Remember makes it easy to share information about people from your family, people you are researching or anyone who has influenced your life.

Here are a few tips to help you make the most of I Remember.

Using Your Existing Footnote Account
You need a free Footnote registration to contribute to I Remember.  If you don’t have one, we create one for you, but if you do, be sure to click the “Already have a Footnote account?” link during the process of adding the application.

This will link your current account to I Remember and make it easier to work between the two sites.  If you run into any problems during this process, contact us at support@footnote.com and we’ll be glad to help.

Finding a Page
Since I Remember is focused on people, the search starts with a First and Last Name.  On the results page you can use the options in the left column to refine your search using a place or year.  Once you are on an I Remember page, you can go to the “Info” tab and see all the facts available to make sure you’ve found the right person.

Remembering and Sharing a Page
When you find the right page, clicking the “I Remember” button to the right of their name gives you a place to explain how you knew the person and then lets you save and share their page with your friends on Facebook or by email.  The first time you remember someone or add something to a page, you’ll be asked to add the I Remember application which adds a couple of steps to the process, but after that it should be smooth sailing.

Adding a Box to Your Profile
Facebook allows you to add a box to your profile that lists some of the people you remember.  This is a great way to quickly get to a page you are working on and lets your friends see who you remember.  Adding a box to your Facebook profile can be a bit tricky.  Here’s what you do:

1. Put your cursor over the “Settings” link at the top of any Facebook page
2. Click on “Applications Settings” from the pull down menu
   
3. Find “I Remember” in the list of applications
4. Click “Edit Settings”
5. On “Profile” tab in the “Edit I Remember Settings” box you’ll see a section called “Box.”  Clicking the “add” link next to “Available” will add the box to the “Boxes” tab on your profile.

To add the box to the main page of your profile, you’ll need to:

1. Go to your profile
2. Click on the Boxes tab
3. Click on the pencil icon in the upper right corner of the I Remember box
4. Click “Move to Wall Tab.”

We hope you’ll let us know what you think of the I Remember application and what we can do to make it better.

Today we’re launching I Remember, an application on Facebook that combines the power of Footnote People Pages with the Facebook community.

With I Remember you can preserve, honor and share the memories of anyone who influenced your life -  your family, friends, classmates, teachers and celebrities.

I Remember includes millions of pages already created from public records including the Social Security Death Index and WWII Army Enlistment Records on Footnote.  It also includes thousands of pages Members have created on their own using information found on Vietnam and USS Arizona memorials, 1860 and 1930 Census or another images on Footnote.

You can learn more about I Remember here or try it out here.

We hope you’ll give it a try and let us know what you think. 

Tip:  To contribute to I Remember you need to be registered with Footnote (a free registered account).  If you already have a Footnote account, be sure to click “Already have a Footnote account?” on the second step of adding the application.  That way, you can use your current Footnote account with I Remember rather than create a new one.

Today as I was looking around Footnote, I came across some images, uploaded by UCHS1960, that are wonderful examples of the power of photographs.  Nothing points out the similarities and differences between the past and the present the way a photo can.

UCHS1960 has uploaded so many great images it’s hard to choose just a few, but here are some that I particularly liked:

After the 1908 Flood

The Circus Comes To Town

Early Taxi Service

Broadway Gets Cement - 1914

The 1928 Union High Football Team

Under the hood of Footnote lies a powerful search engine that keeps track of everything - nearly 300 million images, documents, annotation, comments and stories.

But with the tremendous growth in search traffic on the site, we realized months ago that we needed more horsepower.

For example, our 1930 US Census project alone will add 120 million new people and more than 3 million images.

Starting early this week, we began upgrading our search engine. But it’s a feat akin to trying to swap out your 4-cylinder engine with a V8 while driving down the highway at 65 mph.

As a result, some of you noticed some sluggishness in searches - some bumps in the road.

The good news is that the first phase went live today without a problem (20:05 GMT).

Although, we’re still cruising down the highway, it will be a few more days before we get firing on all cylinders.

Once that’s complete, what does all this effort this mean for you? You should see:

• Quicker search results.
• New content and Member contributions will be findable almost as soon as they are added.
• More historical content added to Footnote will not affect search performance.

We know there will probably be a few hiccups as we fine tune this new engine and apologize in advance for any inconvenience.

Please continue to kick the tires and let us know of any issues you find.

Thanks.

Errol Morris has posted the fourth of five installments of “Whose Father Was He?” — a riveting investigation into a photograph of three children found in the hands of the dead body of Amos Humiston, a fallen Union soldier, at Gettysburg in 1863.

You can see him and his family in the 1860 US Census or view his Page.

We’ve been working hard here at Footnote headquarters and last week we made several updates to the site that we hope will make it easier for you to find what you are looking for and use what you find.

We hope to post more detail about some of the changes later, but here’s an overview of what’s new:

The First Ever Interactive 1930 US Federal Census 
We’re excited to announce that we’ve added images of the 1930 US Federal Census to the site.  This important collection gives insight into life in the early stages of the Great Depression, provides information about US men and women who went on to serve in World War II and makes a great starting place for people researching their family history.  But with Footnote’s interactive census, finding what you are looking for is just the beginning.  Now you can bring these records to life by adding stories, photos, comments, facts, related people.  You can start your search in the 1930 Census here.

I’m Related
With this new feature when you find a family member, friend or someone who influenced your life on a Footnote Page, in the 1860 or 1930 census, on the USS Arizona or Vietnam Memorials or several other collections on the site, you can connect them to your Footnote Member Profile  by clicking the “I’m Related” button.  In the image above, you can see what the check box looks like on an image.  Here’s what it looks like on a Footnote Page:

Search Updates
We’ve received some great feedback about searching Footnote and we’ve made some significant improvements based on your suggestions.  The new search results page makes it easier to narrow or broaden, refine and change your search.  Now you can select the kinds of results you want and remove or add matches found though OCR (Optical Character Recognition–the computer read text of newspapers, city directories and other typed documents).  You’ll also find an improved quicklook and an option to add an image to a Footnote Page right from the search results.  This intro video provides more details about the new search.

A New Look for the Homepage
We’ve created a new, simpler homepage for Footnote that we hope will make it easier for you to find what you are looking for.  We’re still testing things out, so for now this homepage will show up for people who are not signed into the site and for those signed in folks who click the “new homepage” link the yellow bar at the top of the old homepage.  Please try it and let us know what you think.

Refer a Friend
We hope you love Footnote as much as we do and that you are sharing it with your friends.  To make sharing easier, we’ve added a special refer a friend offer.  If you refer a friend using this page, your friend can get $10 off the regular subscription price.

These are just a few of the more visible changes we’ve made to the site, and we’re already working on more.  We hope you’ll continue to send us your comments, suggestions and constructive complaints so that we can make Footnote work for you.