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• More historical content added to Footnote will not affect search performance.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.