It just got a little easier to find what you’re looking for.

Now you can see where your search terms appear on a document, say The Pennsylvania Archives (free), right on the search results page.

Rolling your mouse over any of the highlights in the thumbnail will show you a enlarged view of the word to help you quickly evaluate the document.

This feature is available on both free and premium documents where text matches can be found.

In the viewer, you can quickly toggle the highlighted matches on or off.

For those interested in a little hack. You can edit the URL at the top of your browser to highlight matches for other words as well. Just change the word next to “query=” found at the end of the URL.
Be aware that finding words in printed text (commonly referred to as “OCR”) is not a perfect science especially when that text is blurry or warped.

For those who enjoy sharing their research and stories with Pages, you’ll be glad to know that you can now reorder your entries with a simple drag-and-drop.

To reorder do the following:

1. Click “Turn on edit mode” button
2. Click “Reorder entries”
3. Click and drag the entries into the order you want.
4. Click “I’m Done”

Leave us a comment if you have any suggestions or things you’d like to see on Footnote.

Thanks.

It’s an expensive way to spend President’s Day but, by all accounts, worth it.
According to The Washington Post:

It was a speech so moving the crowd wept. It was a speech so personally important George Washington’s hand shook as he read it until he had to hold the paper still with both hands. After the ceremony, he handed the thing to a friend and sped out the door of the State House in Annapolis, riding off by horse.

For centuries, his words have resonated in American democracy even as the speech itself — the small piece of paper that shook in his hands that day — was quietly put away, out of the public eye and largely forgotten.

Today, however, amid festivities celebrating his birthday, Maryland officials plan to unveil the original document — worth $1.5 million — after acquiring it in a private sale from a family in Maryland who had kept it all these years. It took two years to negotiate the deal and raise money for the speech, which experts consider the most significant Washington document to change hands in the past 50 years.

The speech, scholars say, was a turning point in U.S. history. As the Revolutionary War was winding down, some wanted to make Washington king. Some whispered conspiracy, trying to seduce him with the trappings of power. But Washington renounced them all.

Read the full transcription and view Washington’s speech.
Footnote Members (subscription required) can see the copy of Washington’s 20 Dec 1783 letter stating his intention to resign to Congress.

Update: Almost forgot to mention this document detailing the motion of Congress regarding Washington’s resignation (subscription required).

This past weekend Beau, Donna, and I traveled to sunny St. George to participate in the conference. Donna and I enjoyed the conference as we talked to both novice and experienced family historians as they visited the Footnote booth in the Exhibit Hall. We were thrilled to meet many people who were already using the site. Our own Beau Sharbrough gave three classes and spoke at the Footnote sponsored dinner on Friday night. Dick Eastman joined Donna and me in the Footnote booth. I must say it was fun to have a genealogy celebrity with us at the conference. Footnote recently began sponsoring Dick’s fabulous newsletter.

Those that visited in the booth asked some great questions and offered great suggestions. We learned that it would be beneficial to clearly communicate the level of completion for the different collections. There was a lot of curiosity surrounding the content from NARA we will be featuring on the site next. We also heard the need for a Footnote newsletter. It’s this type of feedback that will help us build a better product.

The conference had a great turn out and I had the chance to meet a lot of wonderful people. Throughout the conference people shared their enthusiasm for family history. I loved hearing people’s eureka moments when they finally found a record that was crucial to the next step of their research. The family historians I met at the conference had a great passion for the past and the documents that preserve history. I must say the family history bug was contagious and I spent several hours this week working on my own family history research. We would also like to congratulate Em Shipley who won a free Annual Membership to Footnote. We felt the conference was a great success and like to thank all those that participated!

Before we launched Footnote, we knew search would be central to the success of the site. But, we couldn’t really know how people would want to search the site, or how our data and images would be best searched until we had some people using the site and a wide selection of data to test against.

On the horns of this dilemma, we decided to launch the site with a simple search that would allow people to find what they were looking for while we gathered feedback that we could use to make search better.

Thanks to everyone for your comments and feedback about search. We hope that as you continue to use the site you’ll send us any suggestions you have using the contact form here.

Although the current search is simple, it does have some advanced options that we thought you might like to know about. We’ll be creating some search helps, but for our blog readers, here’s a sneak peek at some of the things you can do.

Basic Search
The basic search on Footnote looks for records that include all the terms you put in the search box, but if it doesn’t find any records with all your terms it will look for records that include some of the terms you included.

Advanced Search Options
For those of you who like a little more control over your search, you can use some simple commands to create a more sophisticated query.

• Put quotes around exact phrases you want to search for.
  Example [updated]: “defend the constitution”
  Note: Don’t use quotes around first and last name (names are often in different fields of the index).
• Use AND to link words that must be in the result, but not in a particular order.
  Example: John AND Adams
• Adding a plus symbol before a word (or words) will also limit results to those that include the word(s).
  Example: +murder +revolver
• Add a minus symbol before terms you want to exclude.
  Example: -quincy +john +adams
• Adding a NOT before a word will also exclude that word from your search.
  Example: +john +adams NOT quincy
• Use OR to do one search that returns result with similar words.
  Example: Sorensen OR Sorenson
• Use parentheses to group words and commands.
  Example: (Gen OR General) +Washington
• Use one or more question marks in place of a letter to search for variants or errors (note: the ? cannot be the first letter of the word).
  Example: Sorens?n = Sorenson, Sorensen, etc.
  Example #2: Joh??n = Johnson, Johngen, Johnosn

We have just recently added the first run of more titles including:

• The Ratified Amendments XI-XXVII of the U.S. Constitution
• Copybooks of George Washington’s Correspondence with Secretaries of State, 1789-1796
• Naturalization Petitions of the U.S. District Court for the District of Maryland, 1906-1930
• Naturalizations for the Middle District of Pennsylvania, 1906-1930
• Naturalization Petitions for the Eastern District of Louisiana, New Orleans Division, 1838-1861
• Presidential Photos of Coolidge, Eisenhower, Truman, and Roosevelt
• WWII Japanese Photos
• The Case File of the United States v. The Amistad, 1841

You can browse these documents for free by going to the browse homepage.

We are continually adding new content to the site, so keep your eyes open and check back with us regularly. We have received great feedback from our members on the type of content they would like to see. We would love to hear from you as well. Click here to let us know what type of content you would like to see on Footnote.

Last week Justin and I had a nice conversation with historian and blogger Dan Cohen, who has some expertise in digital history. When Footnote launched last month, Dan had some concerns about details in our Terms of Service and Privacy Policy, so he contacted us to get more information.

We really appreciated him calling to talk to us about his concerns. He asked good questions about issues that need open and candid discussion, and we were glad to have a chance to respond. You can read Dan’s summary of our conversation here.

Our goal is to provide easy access to historical documents that people can use to tell the stories of individuals, communities, nations and the world. It’s a difficult and expensive process and we need to find the right balance between, among other things, the content that we can reasonably and responsibly share freely, the content we need to charge money for to keep the business viable and the content that can appropriately be included in a collection for school children.

We appreciate people like Dan who have thought about these issues and are willing to discuss them. We hope that as Footnote develops we’ll be able to continue the conversation and find the right balance.

If you have comments or questions, please feel free to reply to this post or use the contact form here to send them to us.

Back on January 10, we announced our partnership with The National Archives. At the time, we already had over 4 million images primarily consisting of NARA documents that had never been on the Web before. Even more exciting is the vast amounts of new content that will be hitting Footnote throughout the year. We have just started work on three new titles. The first batch of images are available now.

Miscellaneous Papers of the Continental Congress (1774-1789) Consists mainly of papers relating to foreign, naval, and fiscal affairs; papers relating to specific states; and papers kept by the Office of the Secretary of Congress.
Sample Image: A cipher document written by John Jay - Click here

General Photographs of the Fine Arts Commission - Photos and illustrations of subjects including the Founding Fathers, cities, monuments, memorials, etc.
Sample Images: Early illustration of the Philadelphia Museum of Art - Click here

World War II Photos of Japanese Soldiers and of Allied Prisoners of War

New Titles Coming Soon to Footnote

• Domestic Letters of the Department of State from 1784-1906
• Revolutionary War Pensions
• Foreign Letters of the Continental Congress and Department of State from 1785-1790
• Ratified Indian Treaties
• Amistad Collection
• Presidential Photo Collections featuring Coolidge, FDR, Truman and Eisenhower