Last night we added a new feature to the site that will help you get more from Footnote without doing more work.

When you find something on the site that you are interested in, look for a  button and click it.  The item will be added to your “Watch List” in Your Account and we’ll send  you an email whenever that item is updated.

Watching Searches and Titles
Each month we add millions of new images to the site and Footnote Members upload images and annotate thousands of names, dates and places on images they find on the site.

Now you can use Watches to know when something you’ve been looking for has arrived at Footnote.

To set up a Search Watch:
Search for something, for example, Ralph Waldo Emerson

Click the Watch button on the Search results page, we’ll add a Watch with your search terms and let you know when a new match is appears on the site.

If there’s a Title that you are interested in, you can add a Watch and we’ll notify you when new images are added.

Watching Images, Story Pages and Spotlights
You can add a Watch for any image, Story Page or Spotlight and we’ll let you know when they are updated, annotated, commented on, etc.  It might give you the opportunity to learn something surprising or meet someone who shares your research interests.

Watching Members
If you find a Footnote Member who is doing interesting things, you can add a Watch from their Profile page and be notified when they add something new.

Watching Your Own Contributions
By default, we’ll add a Watch to images, Story Pages or Spotlights you add to Footnote.

If you’ve added things in the past and would like to watch them, visit this page and click the button.

Managing Watches
You’ll find your Watch List in Your Account.  There you can see everything you are watching and remove a Watch if you are no longer interested in it.  You can choose how often you’d like to receive your email notifications on the right side of the Watch List page.

Hi! I’m Donna and I’ve worked at Footnote for over a year. Part of what I do is write Story Pages and other miscellany. Here is my Footnote profile.

I found this interesting recommendation when I was annotating in the Confederate Amnesty Papers. The Governor of Tennessee wrote, in behalf of John Russell’s application for amnesty, that he was an old man and a bad rebel. He continued that Russell “had been badly whipped and has not long to live.” You can see the entire case free here.

Two weeks ago, I gave a keynote presentation titled “We Media: How Audiences Are Changing The Future of News and Information” (PDF) at the Fall Meeting of the Association of Information and Dissemination Centers in Arlington, Virgina.

The ASIDIC meeting attracted folks from organizations like ProQuest, Newsbank, Thompson, Hewlett-Packard, NARA and the Smithsonian together to talk about digital content strategies.

If my talk added anything to the conversation, it was this: Whatever your strategy, make sure that Social Media (user contributions, ratings, networks) is a central part of it.

People were clearly open to the message. But just telling people what they already know or want to hear is not actionable. So, I put together a few rules for guiding their innovation.

Why some sites like Facebook experience a meteoric rise and many others never make it off the launch pad is a mystery. But it seems clear that those who are successful have at least these 7 things in common:

1. They start with a compelling idea & simple solution.
2. They let people make their stuff better, more findable or entertaining.
3. They live by the Golden Rule - be nice to others.
4. They encourage lots of feedback.
5. They create “usable exhaust” - new things are created just by people doing stuff they want to do.
6. They let many groups form easily and quickly.
7. They recognize and encourage the good people in the network.

This list will no doubt change over the coming months as more of you help us figure out how to create a better place for you to find, share, relate and discuss your stories.

Update: Social Media Web sites are the future of the media business via CNet.

There is no master plan of History.

Events happen, we witness and, later, we try to make sense of them.

When tragic or momentous events do occur, we often seek to forgo patience for prescience. We want it all to make sense now. We want order and meaning restored.

In an age when reporting has mostly given way to analysis, a look back into history suggests that observations and facts are far more valuable since true perspective can only come with time.

As an example, I came across this letter written by Thomas Jefferson 218 years ago today:

It is vivid and striking not only because of its rich details but in its lack of any superfluous prognostication or color commentary. It’s just the facts written by a shaken but brilliantly coherent observer.

The letter describes an angry mob storming a prison, taking up arms, freeing captives and beheading authorities.

Jefferson, for all of his intellect, cannot see beyond that moment. So he writes for it. It’s what a good reporter would do.

He stands amid the chaos watching the instant one of the world’s most powerful countries begins to furiously unravel at the seams.

He witnesses the genesis of something before its consequences can be known, or before the master plan can be seen - even before it has a name: The French Revolution.

Cross-posted at Hypergene Media Blog

The National Archives unveiled a handwritten note by Abraham Lincoln written on 7 July 1863 telling his generals to bring about “the litteral(sic) or substantial destruction of (Robert E.) Lee’s army” after the battle of Gettysburg. A week after Lincoln’s note, the Confederate army slipped across the Potomac River into Virginia, and the war continued for two more years. This document underscores one of the great missed opportunities for an early end to the Civil War.

In the bibliography of David McCullough’s bestselling book, “1776“, (see what else we’re reading) lies an interesting source: “Revolutionary Pension Records.”

Much of the power of McCullough’s writing comes from his ability to recount an event that happened more than 220 years ago and make seem like it happened yesterday.

The powerful drama unfolds in an unending series of unique, rich and personal details gathered from extensive research. Details like the ones you can now read for the first time online in the Revolutionary War Pension Records.

These newly digitized records contain historical information as well as information useful to those researching their family’s past. And each name contains a complete file of pension documentation - usually about 30 pages.

The pension records are even more valuable when you consider that most of the original service records and the earliest pension records of the Revolutionary War were destroyed in fires in 1800 and 1814.

So we’re proud this week to release the first portion (about 10 percent) of the applications. Soon, we’ll have more than 2 million documents containing 80,000 pension and Bounty-Land-Warrant applications.

To those who think this might sound like something interesting only to librarians or doctoral students, take a look inside.

When a person applied for a pension, he or she had to appear in court and describe - under oath - their service in the Revolutionary War. Widows had to provide information about their marriage.

Details that could be found in files include:

• Marriage certificates
• Property schedules
• Letters
• Pages from family Bibles
• Diaries
• Journals
• Witnesses’ affidavits
• Details of battles and campaigns
• Troop movement
• Civil events and conditions
• Family relationships

Each file offers an intensely human story of the brave individuals who sacrificed life and limb to make the ideals of the Declaration of Independence something more than words on parchment.

Take the typical case of Matthias Armbruster, “an old Soldier of the American Revolutionary Army.”

He enlisted in 1776 for one year in Germantown and then marched to Quebec.

He fought at the battles of Brandywine, Trenton, Princeton, Monmouth and the capture of Stoney Point.

He received bayonet wounds to the front of his head and his right arm from a “horseman whom he shot dead but afterwards.”

Check out the first-hand account of Mr. Armbruster, just 79,999 stories left to tell.

When complete, all of the images and indexes of this collection can be found on Footnote or will be freely viewable at the more than 4,500 LDS Church-run family history centers around the world.

When we were building Footnote we knew we had to build something that would make sense of documents. A computer is not smart enough to read the text or handwritten copy found in most historical documents. That is where people come in.

The Annotation Tool, found in the Viewer (see more about the viewer), is provided as a way to let you label important information you find in documents.

Right now there are four types of annotations you can make:

• Name: for persons first & last name, titles
• Date: for any month, day, year
• Place: any location
• Text: for anything else

Annotating isn’t just helpful for searching, it’s now a good way to remember what documents you’ve found.
Go to your Profile page and browse annotations you have made. Clicking on any other Member name will show the same for them.
The Annotation page (See example page) will show you all of the annotations added by any Footnote Member and a link back to that image or help you perform a search using the information found in that annotation.

If you have a blog or a website be sure to add the Footnote Card to your site. In this example, you will see that this member ‘dbreckenridge’ has made several annotations that link back to their annotation history. (Go to Account > Footnote Card to get it, requires sign-in)
Every annotation made is instantly searchable making documents more findable for everyone. Get started annotating one of these free documents below. (Free Membership Required to annotate)

• Look for names in this roster from the Pennsylvania Archives
• This Hudson, MA City Directory has several names and locations

Don’t believe us? Check it out for yourself. We’d like to thank Chris Fralic for discovering this. And while we’re on the topic, we’d also like to thank Mr. Ebay for his brave service, too.

Here at Footnote we enjoy reading about history. Here’s what’s been on our reading table:

• 1776 by David McCullough
• Mayflower: A Story of Courage, Community, and War by Nathaniel Philbrick
• Don’t Know Much About History: Everything You Need to Know About American History but Never Learned by Kenneth C. Davis

Each of these books reveals the history of something we all thought we knew in a fresh way leaving us hungry to learn more.

For example, 1776 tells the dramatic story about the start of the Revolutionary War richly detailed with all of the Colonists missteps, bravery, luck and perseverance.

It was the detail that brought the story to life, a result of tremendous amounts of research.

Inspired, I found myself searching for supporting documents and historic characters on Footnote. For instance, you can find several letters and writings from Nathaniel Greene, Henry Knox, and many others from that era. Jake, our IT guy, created a review of 1776 with some documents he found in the Letters from General George Washington supporting the book.

Because we like to read about history we also encourage people to write about history. And it doesn’t have to be some monumental event.

There is always a story to tell when looking back, whether it be about your own family, a time period, or particular interest you might have.

Try starting a Story Page today and add your footnote to history.

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!