Eyewitness Accounts from NARA

What was it like to be there when Nixon was resigning? What about the Apollo 8 mission? During the Revolutionary War? We can't go back and experience these events ourselves, but we can relive them through the eyewitness accounts of others. NARA has compiled an exhibit showing off some of the documents that contain these accounts.

A Footnote blog post reminded me of the NARA document of the day which led me to the Eyewitness Accounts.

NARA Document of the Day
NARA Eyewitness Accounts
Footnote Blog

Footnote on Download Squad... people love their UFOs

So the latest press release has continued to generate a lot of interest, at least in more "mainstream" places. Events like the partnership with FamilySearch generated interest among family historians/genealogists but nothing that reached a wide audience.

I mentioned last week that the press release got picked up by Forbes but later on Friday, Download Squad (a well known blog for those of you not familiar) posted about Footnote's release on Project Blue Book.

Footnote's Project Blue Book lets you read government reports, as well as questionnaires filled out by those who say they spotted a UFO. With nearly 130,000 images to wade through, good luck uncovering evidence of a massive government conspiracy in your free time.

Footnote publishes government UFO data on DownloadSquad.com

Footnote on Forbes

Well, it's mostly just a reprint of the press release, but getting picked up by Forbes is a big deal :)

Footnote.com Exposes Government UFO Records

Image featured to the right

Spotlights - Another New Feature!

Recently a bunch of new features were added to the site, one of which is Spotlights. You can think of a spotlight as a cross between a story page and a comment. Here is one of the spotlights that I created about the Halifax Gazette.

Why would you want to add one yourself?
Well, there is a lot of content buried on the Footnote website that is just waiting to be discovered and shared. Spotlights are your opportunity to shine a light on those tidbits for others to see. Imagine that you are reading through the Halifax Gazette and you see an interesting article. You could send a link to the image to your friends in an email but then you're only sharing it with a few people. You could create a story page. But a story page seems like overkill for a quick comment, right? This is the perfect time for you to create a spotlight. This way instead of just sharing with your email contacts, you can easily share it with all your fellow Footnote members.

Check out what others have spotlighted and shine some light on your favorite Footnote content by creating some Spotlights.

Footnote is a Four Star Site

Footnote was recently reviewed by About.com's Kimberly Powell.

Here is an excerpt:

Footnote.com has the framework in place to be one of the most flexible and user-friendly sites on the Web for American genealogists. Once they add more records (and there are many in the works), upgrade the search feature, and do some tweaking, it has the potential to be a 5 star site.

Footnote.com gets four stars from About.com