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.

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.

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.

Overwhelming traffic
The biggest problem is that we underestimated how fast word would get out and just how popular a free 1930 census would be.  The interest has overwhelmed our servers, which has made the Footnote experience slow, frustrating, error prone and pretty much the opposite of everything we work hard to make it.

We are doing what we can to improve the experience and will be upgrading our systems to handle more visitors, but this will take some time.  In the mean time, we expect that as the initial excitement dies down (or is dampened by the slowness of the site), things will improve.

If we can’t get things stabilized in the next few days, we will postpone the free 1930 offer until the systems are ready to handle it.  We hope we don’t have to do that, but we want you to be able to use the census while it’s free and we need to be sure that we provide a quality experience for our current paying members.

We’ll post additional updates about the status of the traffic problems here on the blog.

Confusion about how to get to the census for free
We’ve heard some reports about people having problems getting the free access. To get to the census for free, you have to go through the promotional page at http://go.footnote.com/1930census.  Going through this page allows us place a cookie that gives you special access to the 1930. Once you’ve got that cookie, as long as you are on the site, you should be able to search from anywhere on the site and get into the 1930 census free.  If you close the browser and come back, you’ll need to go back to the 1930 promotion page again.

Printing and downloading
For the first day or so of the promotion, we had an error on the site which was telling people they needed to subscribe in order to print or download one of the free 1930 images.  We fixed the problem earlier this week, so if you tried to print or download earlier, we hope you’ll try again.

With I Remember you can preserve, honor and share the memories of anyone who influenced your life -  your family, friends, classmates, teachers and celebrities.

I Remember includes millions of pages already created from public records including the Social Security Death Index and WWII Army Enlistment Records on Footnote.  It also includes thousands of pages Members have created on their own using information found on Vietnam and USS Arizona memorials, 1860 and 1930 Census or another images on Footnote.

You can learn more about I Remember here or try it out here.

We hope you’ll give it a try and let us know what you think. 

Tip:  To contribute to I Remember you need to be registered with Footnote (a free registered account).  If you already have a Footnote account, be sure to click “Already have a Footnote account?” on the second step of adding the application.  That way, you can use your current Footnote account with I Remember rather than create a new one.

View the video below:

Try a wildcard search now.

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.

This morning I was looking through some photos on the site and came into a section of photos taken in England of planes that had been damaged on missions, but still returned to base.

Here are a couple of examples:

Then I came across this one:

I did a little research and found a Missing Air Crew Report for this plane (one member of the crew was killed) and then found Footnote Pages, created from the Social Security Death Index, for the pilot, Lawrence DeLancey and the navigator, Ray Ledoux. I added a few web links and some stories about this amazing event to their pages.

Here’s the first image in the section of battle damaged planes in England. You can browse through the collection using the filmstrip at the bottom to look at other images.

You can view all the World War II Airforce images for free.

Tonight I remembered his story and thought about my own friend, David Burgess, who was killed along with his mother in an auto accident when he and I were five.

My memories of his last two hours of life haven’t dimmed much in the intervening years.

His hand waving out of the car window as they drove away…   I can still see his hand waving…

He would be dead in just a few more minutes.

I found the old newspaper clippings that I’d cut from the Salt Lake Tribune the day after the accident and used them in a Footnote page about David’s last day on earth.

The story from my perspective would have gone to the grave with me until Roger’s comments triggered  memories of my friend, David Burgess ……..  and now, thanks to Footnote, the story is recorded for others.  Click here to read it.

I hope his siblings find it one day.

How many memories, photos and old newspaper clippings do you have stored away that need to be recorded and shared before it is too late?

Jot them down.  Put them on Footnote pages and also in a binder that you donate to the family history department in a library.

Someone, sometime, will be extremely appreciative of your thoughtfulness.

Gifts of this nature are worth more than gold.  If you’ve ever been the recipient of one of these “gifts”, you know that it is true.