This morning I am asking for your opinion on Footnote.com. I currently do not subscribe to this and have considered it several times. If you subscribe, what has your experience been? What regions of the country are you searching? Are there many of the same records there as on Ancestry.com?
I have a free three month trial subscription to Archives.com and feel much of what is there I can find on Ancestry.com. Archives is relatively new but they pull their databases from some of the same places I already obtain information. Being so new, I do not thing Archives.com is a subscription I will need right now.
What are your thoughts on all of the above?
I subscribed to Footnote earlier this year when they were offering a 50% discount. To be honest, I have not spent that much time on the site, simply because I find their search interface to be difficult to use. I had a hard time trying to narrow down the returns to the specific area I was looking for. I was able to find some civil war records on my husband’s family, but felt like it was a battle (no pun intended) just to find them and gave up looking for any of my family. To be fair, I do need to give the site another chance. Perhaps I am so accustomed to Ancestry and Family Search’s layout that I’m being resistant to Footnote.
I agree with Jenna about the challenge of searching for things on Footnote. However, despite the clunky search, I have found some wonderful things including my ancestors’ Dawes files (Chickasaw) and my great-grandfathers (California) naturalization papers. I’ve also noticed that Footnote has some city directories that Ancestry does not.
On Footnote, you can also create pages for your ancestors. I have not done that, so I can’t comment on it.