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.

We received good feedback last month on the tips you would like to see in the future. The most common request was search tips. One search tool that is very beneficial on Footnote is the use of wildcards. We have created a short video that demonstrates how to use wildcards to improve search results.

View the video below:

Try a wildcard search now.

We were honored today to hear that Footnote has received the ThinkGenealogy Innovator Award.  We’d like to thank Footnote Members, the Academy, everyone at … (music begins to play softly in the background).

Mark Tucker, a mild mannered software architect by day, becomes a family historian and blogger in his free time.  At ThinkGenealogy he writes about everything from the intersection of genealogy and technology to sourcing and citation and provides fun and interesting family history related insights and the occasional puzzle.

Thanks Mark.  We’d love to repeat, so we’ll see what we can come up with this year.