The latest collection on Footnote.com is the Native American collection which was released yesterday. Working together with the National Archives and Allen County Library, Footnote.com has created a unique collection that will help people discover new details about Native American history. The Footnote Interactive Native American Collection features original historical documents including:

• Ratified Indian Treaties – dating back to 1722
• Indian Census Rolls – featuring personal information including age, place of residence and degree of Indian blood
• The Guion Miller Roll – perhaps the most important Cherokee genealogical research
• Dawes Packets – containing original applications for tribal enrollments
• And other documents relating to the Five Civilized Tribes

Footnote.com’s Native American Collection creates an interactive environment where members can search, annotate, and add comments to the original documents. Additionally, visitors can view pages for many of the Native American tribes that include historical events on a time line and map, a photo gallery, stories and comments added by the community.

Footnote.com also provides a free service where visitors can create their own web pages for their Native American family. “Native Americans have a rich oral history,” explains Russ Wilding, CEO of Footnote.com. “We hope that the online community will use Footnote Pages to preserve these stories, which will help ensure that they do not become lost to future generations.”

We need to do some maintenance on Footnote tonight that requires us to take the site down for a little while.

Our plan is to start at 10 PM Mountain Time.  The maintenance should take about 3 hours and we’ll get the site back up as quickly as we can.

We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause.

We wanted to provide an update on our Holocaust Collection. Originally, we planned to have these records open to the public for only the month of October. However, due to the popularity of this collection, we have decided to keep the records open free to the public through the rest of this year. This will enable more people to search and explore the original records from the National Archives.

On January 1, 2010 these records will become part of the paid subscription on Footnote.com. These records, however, will remain free to access through any of the National Archives physical locations. You can access the Holocaust Collection from this page: http://go.footnote.com/holocaust_records/.

Today Footnote.com announced it will digitize and create a searchable database for all publicly available U.S. Federal Censuses, ranging from the first U.S. Census taken in 1790 to the most current public census from 1930. Through its partnership with the National Archives, Footnote.com will add more than 9.5 million images featuring over half a billion names to its extensive online record collection.

With over 60 million historical records already online, Footnote.com will use the U.S. Census records to tie content together, creating a pathway to discover additional records that previously have been difficult to find.

“We see the census as a highway leading back to the 18th century,” explains Russ Wilding, CEO of Footnote.com. “This Census Highway provides off-ramps leading to additional records on the site such as naturalization records, historical newspapers, military records and more. Going forward, Footnote.com will continue to ad valuable and unique collections that will enhance the census collection.”

As more census decades are added to the site, visitors to Footnote.com can view the status for each decade and sign up for an email notification when more records are added to the site for a particular year.

View the Census Progress Page on Footnote.com.

In addition to making these records more accessible, Footnote.com is advancing the way people use the census by creating an interactive experience. Footnote members can enrich the census records by adding their own contributions. Users can:

• Add comments and insights about a person
• Upload and attach scanned photos or documents related to that person
• Generate a Footnote Page for any individual that features stories, a photo gallery, timeline and map
• Identify relatives found in the census by clicking the I’m Related button

“We will continue to move aggressively to add records to the site, specifically those that are requested by our members and others that are not otherwise available on the internet,” said Wilding.

The Interactive Census Project is now underway. Enjoy and interact with the project here.

Julian Noga was raised in the town of Skrzynka, Poland by his mother on her four-acre farm while his father was in the United States.  When Julian was 16 years, he left home and moved to Tarnow. In downtown Tarnow, he worked as a dishwasher at an elegant Jewish club.

When the Germans invaded Poland in September of 1939, Julian returned to his home town of Skrynka. He returned home to find that 27 of Skrzynka’s Jews were forced to dig their own graves and then shot. He hid a rifle in some nearby woods but was unable to use it before he was deported to Austria to do farm labor for a rich landowner near Linz.

Near Linz, he fell in love with Frieda, the land owner’s daughter. She loved him too. Her father objected, but the two continued to meet at night in secret. Nazi law forbade romance between Poles and Germans and the Gestapo warned Julian that if he ever saw Frieda again he would be hanged. He was assigned to another farm but continued to see Frieda. He was arrested and transferred to Flossenbürg. In Flossenbürg, Julian was sentenced to do backbreaking labor in a quarry.

Julian was liberated on April 23, 1945 and after the war he reunited with his love Frieda. You can remember Julian and share more of his stories on his Footnote page.

The National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) and Footnote.com released the internet’s largest Interactive Holocaust Collection today. The collection can be viewed at www.footnote.com/holocaust. The collection has over one million Holocaust related records; including millions of names and 26,000 photos from the National Archives.

“We cannot afford to forget this period in our history” said Dr. Michael Kurtz, Assistant Archivist of the United States and author of America and the Return of Nazi Contraband: The Recovery of Europe’s Cultural Treasures. “Working with Footnote, these records will become more widely accessible, and will help people now and in the future learn more about the events and impact of the Holocaust.”

Included among the National Archives records available online at Footnote.com are:

• Concentration camp registers and documents from Dachau, Mauthausen, Auschwitz, and Flossenburg
• The “Ardelia Hall Collection” of records relating to the Nazi looting of Jewish possessions, including looted art
• Captured German records including deportation and death lists from concentration camps
• Nuernberg War Crimes Trial proceedings

The collection also includes nearly 600 interactive personal accounts of those who survived or perished in the Holocaust provided by the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. The project incorporates social networking tools that enable visitors to search for names and add photos, comments and stories, share their insights, and create pages to highlight their discoveries. There will be no charge to access and contribute to these personal pages.

Visit The Holocaust Collection for free in the month of October.

With a lot of help from the great folks at Family Tree Magazine, we are pleased to introduce the first ever Footnote Webinar.

This free 30-minute introduction to using Footnote covers:

• Records you’ll find on Footnote
• Searching Footnote
• Using the Footnote viewer
• Creating Footnote Pages

We do our best to make Footnote easy to use (and we’d appreciate any feedback that can help us get there), but there’s so much you can do on the site that a tutorial like this is a great way to get going.

Have a look at the webinar and the Getting the most out of Footnote page and let us know what you think in a comment here or through the Contact Footnote page.

Adding more than 1 million new records per month, Footnote.com will mark the month of October, designated Family History Month, with the addition of its 60 millionth image.

Since its launch in January 2007, Footnote.com has partnered with organizations including The National Archives and Gannett to digitize and index valued historical documents and photos and make them available online.

“Footnote.com is more than just a repository of documents and images,” said Russ Wilding, CEO of Footnote.com. “It’s a social gathering place where visitors can add photos, documents and other personal contributions, to create a more detailed and rich picture of our past.”

A favorite site of scholars, historians and genealogists Footnote.com has hundreds of rare and unique record collections including:

• Historical Newspapers
• Revolutionary War Documents
• Civil War Records and Photos
• The Interactive Vietnam Veterans Memorial
• WWII Collection

Included among the millions of records are a number of free collections like the Social Security Death Index (SSDI), which gives visitors the opportunity to create interactive experiences from a simple index. For each of the SSDI records Footnote.com has created a page that features a dynamic timeline, map, photo gallery, and section for others to contribute stories and insights about an individual.

Continue reading at http://bit.ly/Vk00b.

On September 21, 1981, Sandra Day O’Connor was appointed the first female associate Supreme Court Justice in Washington D.C., under the presidency of Ronald Reagan. She was a popular jurist and politician from Arizona. Read more about this monumental event at Footnote.com.

Today in History: Star-Spangled Banner penned as War of 1812 looms. Find out more about the Star-Spangled Banner and the author, Francis Scott Key, at Footnote.com.