Footnote.com: Answering some questions

Every time that an online site announces the addition of new collections, you can be sure that geneabloggers will chime in with questions and suggestions.

Footnote.com's recent announcement has produced responses by both Diane Haddad of the Genealogy Insider blog at Family Tree Magazine and Randy Seaver of Genea-Musings.

Diane asked Footnote's Justin Schroepfer a few good questions about the recent interactive census announcement. Her post provided the questions (below) and Justin's answers:

1. Is Footnote creating new census images and indexes? How is this being done?

2. When will we start seeing the new censuses added to the site? What states will be first? When do you anticipate the collection will be complete?

3. Looking down the road, how will the census addition affect Footnote’s subscription pricing ($79.95 per year or $11.95 per month)?

4. Will changes to the workings of the site be necessary to accommodate the added data, searches and traffic?

Check out Diane's post at the link above for the answers.

On the same subject, Randy Seaver's post on Genea-Musings offered an excellent suggestion for Footnote.com to consider.

The site offers Footnote Pages for the 1930 Federal Census (and many other collections), so visitors can create a page for each individual of interest. This means that each census can create a separate page for each person. The problem is that there will be multiple census pages created for one individual listed in many censuses.

Randy's suggestion:

In my humble opinion, Footnote.com needs to find a way to combine the several records for a person so that there is only one Footnote Page for an individual. If they can accomplish that, then Footnote.com may well be the best place online to have a wiki environment collection of Person Pages, with user-submitted photographs, documents, stories, vital records, etc.

Excellent idea, Randy!