Footnote.com offers 7 Day Free Access

If you have been wondering whether or not Footnote.com would be useful in your family history research, this may be an offer you would find useful. Of course these free offers are not always free. If you really don't want a full subscription, you must make sure you cancel it within the "free" period.

As you may know Footnote.com was recently acquired by Ancestry.com. For now it appears these two data rich sites will continue to operate as separate subscriptions. Footnote's strength is its association with the treasure trove of historical documents held by the US National Archives. Currently featured are Revolutionary War items which include pension records, war rolls, service records and papers of the Continental Congress.


Lots of people do not realize that fee-based services like Ancestry and Footnote offer some of their resources free as a way to attract potential customers. See my post of March 26th about free areas of Ancestry. Footnote also has portions of its database which are also accessible even if one does not have a paid subscription.


If you decide to pursue this 7 day free trial, visit this link http://www.footnote.com/freetrial/.

Footnote and Ancestry

Four weeks ago Dr D reported that there had been agreement for Ancestry to acquire iArchive along with its flagship database Footnote.com. This morning came a notice that the deal officially was completed today. As you may know there has been speculation among the genealogy community as to whether Footnote would continue to operate independently or would be absorbed into Ancestry. As of today the former option is being pursued.


The following is extracted from an email sent to current Footnote customers: 
"The plan is to continue to run Footnote.com the way we have always run Footnote.com." 
"It has been exciting to see Footnote.com grow over the past 4 years. Footnote.com started with only 5 million historical documents and today we have nearly 70 million searchable documents, over 1 million members, nearly 100,000 Footnote Pages, and over half million annotations added." 


So, at least for now, it looks like both will continue to operate as they had been operating. Will it continue? Is this a model of how other acquisitions such as Genline will be managed? Stay tuned for the rest of the story in future months.

Ancestry.com Inc. to Acquire iArchives

Yesterday Ancestry.com issued a press release announcing it had "entered into a definitive agreement to acquire iArchives,Inc." This acquisition includes Footnote.com "a leading American History Web site. Ancestry stated "This acquisition will provide the company with a complementary consumer brand, expanded content offerings, and enhanced digitization and image-viewing technologies."

In early trading today Ancestryystock is up slightly. However, it is not up nearly as much as the market as a whole. That is to be expected as investors generally become cautious when one company acquires the debt of another. Over the past several days Ancestry (ACOM) has been part of the general market gains.

Ancestry itself has experienced phenomenal growth over the last year and there have been some recent whispers that it might be the kind of company that would be an attractive acquisition for an even larger corporation.