The popular genealogy website Ancestry.com is about to acquire iArchives, Inc., which is the parent company of the website Footnote.com. This means Ancestry.com is about to join with one if it’s biggest rivals. The acquisition will be completed towards the end of 2010. This is great news for genealogists!
Ancestry.com offers a revolutionary search engine that allows genealogists who have subscribed to their website to search through a variety of databases. You are able to search for a particular ancestor by name, which is convenient. They have digital images of many of their records. You can find passport applications, Federal records that are on microfilm, military service records, and draft registration cards from World War I. Ancestry.com is known for it’s database of the census records for the United States.
Footnote will be a great addition to the Ancestry.com website. Footnote might be best known for it’s collection of military records. They have service and pension records from the Revolutionary War, and several Confederate collections. They are working on digitizing Union service records, and also the widow’s pension application files. Footnote also allows people to access Charleston, South Carolina and estate inventories for free.
Now, this is where things get exciting! Footnote has been using a tagging system to document images, names, and places, in it’s database. Users of the Footnote website are able to put a tag on any image that they can identify. This is similar in some ways to the tagging method of photos that one can find on facebook. This system allows for collaborate indexing of documents, records, and images in the database. Footnote also allows the people who use their website to upload the documents that they have located through their own genealogy research into the Footnote database. It is called “Footnote Pages”, and one can also add their own photos and stories as well.
This means that soon, Ancestry.com will be able to offer this interactive tagging system to it’s users as well. They have been working on a “MemberConnect” service for their users. Combine the databases of information from Ancestry.com, with the archives from Footnote.com, and soon, genealogists will have access to a huge amount of information! The “web 2.0” tagging function will bring an interconnectivity that was not available to genealogists before this merging of websites.
Image by Beverly & Pack on Flickr