Footnote Pages - Facebook for the Deceased

Following up on my earlier blog about social networking and collaboration among online genealogists, Footnote.com introduced a new service this afternoon at the TechCrunch50 conference in San Francisco. In his presentation, Footnote CEO Russ Wilding introduced the new Footnote Pages as something like "Facebook for the deceased." The new interactive pages allow users to connect and share stories, photos, documents, and other information about the people important to them. To kick off the new Footnote Pages, Footnote.com begins with 80 million template pages created from data taken from the U.S. Social Security Death Index, enhanced with an interactive timeline and a map. From these starter pages, Footnote members can add photos and stories, link to historical documents, and indicate relationships to another individual's Footnote Page on Footnote.com to create a rich page of information about an individual.

I was able to locate the basic Footnote Page for my grandfather James Owens, but not without a little doing. With such a common name, I obviously needed to narrow down my options. When I tried my usual method of narrowing down by location or year using the left-hand side options, however, it didn't work. For the location I was unable to type just the state - that field was populated with the city and state from the SSDI, so you have to know the zip code where the last Social Security payment was sent. Rather than mess with that, I tried narrowing down by year, but was told there were no results for 1969. Abandoning that approach, I was able to locate my grandfather by entering his birth date and death date as keywords at the top of the page. Why one method worked and the other didn't, I have no idea. Probably a glitch that will be corrected soon.

For genealogists with full online family trees, I'm not sure that these new Footnote Pages have much new to offer. But for many people, including genealogists who don't want to put their entire family tree online, these pages provide a rich and easy opportunity to share information online about your favorite ancestors, and connect with other relatives. You might want to add pages for your brick wall ancestors or family tree progenitors, for example, in hopes of finding others researching that same individual. Try out Footnote Pages for yourself and let me know what you think!

To get a good feel for what you can do with Footnote Pages, check out this example of a Footnote Page for Rita H. Goodson.