Roots Television | Megan's Roots World

Oh, man . . . I am on a genealogical bender. Subscribing to new sites left and right. Just signed on for findmypast yesterday and footnote today. So many toys, so little time.

I'm not going to do an in-depth review of Footnote (at least not now) because Dick Eastman and Chris Dunham already have. See for yourself:

National Archives and Footnote Launch Project to Digitize Historic Documents Online

Footnote.com for Historians, Genealogists and Many Others

Taking Note of Footnote

But I have spent a little time playing and can say that this looks like another fun site. It's another one of those situations where it will become more useful over time, but I really like the way it works. As Chris pointed out, the searching is very google-like (be sure to search "lastname, firstname" as well as "firstname lastname"). And I especially like the visual interface -- the zooming, ability to save to your own gallery (as I did with a few items that looked interesting, and worthy of later follow-up), and so forth.

There doesn't appear to be much that will help with my own family yet, but I enjoyed poking around on terms like "Ruthenian" and "Greek Catholic" (my kind was very suspicious during WWI!). See below for one example of a few fellows vouching for one of their church members. Another feature that I particularly appreciated is that names of sponsors on naturalizations are frequently indexed (in addition to the person petitioning for naturalization), so you might get lucky and turn up an ancestor vouching for a buddy.

If you want to entertain yourself while getting a feel for the site, try searching on "evading draft" and "draft evasion" to see records of investigations of those who allegedly or actually tried to avoid the WWI draft.

Boy, if 2007 keeps up at this pace, this is going to be a watershed year for genealogy!