• Ratified Indian Treaties – dating back to 1722
• Indian Census Rolls – featuring personal information including age, place of residence and degree of Indian blood
• The Guion Miller Roll – perhaps the most important Cherokee genealogical research
• Dawes Packets – containing original applications for tribal enrollments
• And other documents relating to the Five Civilized Tribes

Footnote.com’s Native American Collection creates an interactive environment where members can search, annotate, and add comments to the original documents. Additionally, visitors can view pages for many of the Native American tribes that include historical events on a time line and map, a photo gallery, stories and comments added by the community.

Footnote.com also provides a free service where visitors can create their own web pages for their Native American family. “Native Americans have a rich oral history,” explains Russ Wilding, CEO of Footnote.com. “We hope that the online community will use Footnote Pages to preserve these stories, which will help ensure that they do not become lost to future generations.”

On January 1, 2010 these records will become part of the paid subscription on Footnote.com. These records, however, will remain free to access through any of the National Archives physical locations. You can access the Holocaust Collection from this page: http://go.footnote.com/holocaust_records/.

When the Germans invaded Poland in September of 1939, Julian returned to his home town of Skrynka. He returned home to find that 27 of Skrzynka’s Jews were forced to dig their own graves and then shot. He hid a rifle in some nearby woods but was unable to use it before he was deported to Austria to do farm labor for a rich landowner near Linz.

Near Linz, he fell in love with Frieda, the land owner’s daughter. She loved him too. Her father objected, but the two continued to meet at night in secret. Nazi law forbade romance between Poles and Germans and the Gestapo warned Julian that if he ever saw Frieda again he would be hanged. He was assigned to another farm but continued to see Frieda. He was arrested and transferred to Flossenbürg. In Flossenbürg, Julian was sentenced to do backbreaking labor in a quarry.

Julian was liberated on April 23, 1945 and after the war he reunited with his love Frieda. You can remember Julian and share more of his stories on his Footnote page.

“We cannot afford to forget this period in our history” said Dr. Michael Kurtz, Assistant Archivist of the United States and author of America and the Return of Nazi Contraband: The Recovery of Europe’s Cultural Treasures. “Working with Footnote, these records will become more widely accessible, and will help people now and in the future learn more about the events and impact of the Holocaust.”

Included among the National Archives records available online at Footnote.com are:

• Concentration camp registers and documents from Dachau, Mauthausen, Auschwitz, and Flossenburg
• The “Ardelia Hall Collection” of records relating to the Nazi looting of Jewish possessions, including looted art
• Captured German records including deportation and death lists from concentration camps
• Nuernberg War Crimes Trial proceedings

The collection also includes nearly 600 interactive personal accounts of those who survived or perished in the Holocaust provided by the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. The project incorporates social networking tools that enable visitors to search for names and add photos, comments and stories, share their insights, and create pages to highlight their discoveries. There will be no charge to access and contribute to these personal pages.

Visit The Holocaust Collection for free in the month of October.

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.

Since its launch in January 2007, Footnote.com has partnered with organizations including The National Archives and Gannett to digitize and index valued historical documents and photos and make them available online.

“Footnote.com is more than just a repository of documents and images,” said Russ Wilding, CEO of Footnote.com. “It’s a social gathering place where visitors can add photos, documents and other personal contributions, to create a more detailed and rich picture of our past.”

A favorite site of scholars, historians and genealogists Footnote.com has hundreds of rare and unique record collections including:

• Historical Newspapers
• Revolutionary War Documents
• Civil War Records and Photos
• The Interactive Vietnam Veterans Memorial
• WWII Collection

Included among the millions of records are a number of free collections like the Social Security Death Index (SSDI), which gives visitors the opportunity to create interactive experiences from a simple index. For each of the SSDI records Footnote.com has created a page that features a dynamic timeline, map, photo gallery, and section for others to contribute stories and insights about an individual.

Continue reading at http://bit.ly/Vk00b.

Today in History: Star-Spangled Banner penned as War of 1812 looms. Find out more about the Star-Spangled Banner and the author, Francis Scott Key, at Footnote.com.

The census promotion is still bringing lots of people to the site (there are still 10 days left), but some of yesterday’s extra traffic came from Kim Komando naming Footnote the “Cool Site of the Day.”

Thanks Kim. We’re thrilled to have been picked as a Cool Site and we’ll do our best to keep freshening up history.