Thanksgiving Special at Footnote.com

Footnote.com is offering a special 20% discount off their regular annual membership price during and just after Thanksgiving weekend. This promotion will run from midnight Mountain Time on Friday, November 23 through 11:59 PM on Tuesday, November 27.

For those of you who are not aware of what the Footnote site has to offer, here are some details. Footnote works with the National Archives to scan historical documents and offer them to be viewed by the public. They have free content which include the Pennsylvania Archives, the American Milestone Documents (such as the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, etc.), the papers of the Continental Congress, and correspondence of George Washington. The newest paid content includes the following:

• * WWII JAG Case Files, Pacific - Army
• * WWII JAG Case Files, Pacific - Navy
• * Naval Press Clippings
• * Japanese Air Target Analyses
• * American Colonization Society
• * Admiralty Records, Key West
• * WWI Military Cablegrams - AEF and War Dept
• * Utah Territorial Case Files

Titles that they are adding to on a regular daily basis are:

• * Civil War Pensions Index 60% Complete
• * Navy Widows' Certificates 62% Complete
• * Naturalizations - MA 95% Complete
• * FBI Case Files 86% Complete
• * Naturalizations - CA Southern 98% Complete
• * Naturalizations - PA Eastern 78% Complete
• * Naturalizations - PA Western 84% Complete
• * Naturalizations - PA Middle 96% Complete
• * Revolutionary War Pension Files 93% Complete
• * Texas Birth Certificates (1903-10, 1926-29) 36% Complete
• * Texas Death Certificates 4% Complete

These are just a sampling of what's available. The two main record groups I've used the most so far are the Historical Files of the U.S. Expeditionary Force, North Russia, 1918 - 1919 (because my great-grandfather Robbins was a part of this expedition); and the Civil War Pensions Index (because the pension cards have different information--and are clearer images--than the ones featured at Ancestry.com).

There's more to the Footnote site than just records, which of course are appealing to researchers, historians, genealogists, history teachers, and the like. They have some terrific technological features as well, which include zooming in on images with great clarity, adding transcriptions and notations to scanned documents, Spotlights (a way to highlight and write about interesting historical documents) and Story Pages (which can be used as a blog [web log, or journal] or a way to record in written form and then share anything that is of interest to the viewer--not just historical information).

If you live in the Spokane area and are a member of the Eastern Washington Genealogical Society, we will be offering a computer class on September 20th, 2008 to learn how to navigate and use this site, as well as to explore its content. It will be presented by yours truly. Meantime, I suggest you check out the many things Footnote has to offer, both the free content and the subscription materials, by clicking on the image below.