It almost seems like an April Fool's joke, but it isn't April. Footnote.com is going to change its great name and its focus. Footnote is a great resource. The scanned records have excellent detailed information, and make great reading, even if you stumble upon records that apply to someone you have never heard of. And they can be very helpful if you find records pertaining to the ancestor you look for. Many of the records are free. It is an amazing source for those elusive southern records.I recently learned that footnote.com is are going to be increasing its number of military records dramatically, and that the company wishes to highlight this change in focus with a name change. They will now be called Fold3 as a reference to the flag and patriotism. Say what? At first I thought--oh they are going to completely change and they won't have the great material they always provided, but I checked myself and thought--better to hope this is a good move for the company and for researchers. Well, then I read Megan Smolenyak's article for the Huffington Post on the topic, and realized it might be time to get worried about the future of footnote.com. She articulates her concerns about the change very well at:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/megan-smolenyak-smolenyak/google-news-archive-and-f_b_931560.html. In the same post, she comments on the changes at google news archive, one of my favorite archives. Apparently searching the site is becoming more and more difficult. Ah, and what did I recently hear about collaboration and cooperation being the wave of the future in genealogy. Au contraire--we may have to hone our old library skills.
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