I’ve had a membership to WorldVitalRecords.com since the beginning of that website. I went to work for Everton’s in 2006, and they had a relationship with World Vital Records, allowing WVR to scan books and magazines in the Everton collection to be posted on the World Vital Records site. In all the time I worked as the editor of the Genealogical Helper (2006-2009), I watched millions of records being posted at the site, including some of my own, without WorldVitalRecords.com ever seeming to achieve it’s goals and promise to become the #2 genealogy site on the web. I was laid off at Everton’s in early 2009, and continued to watch the WVR progress. They developed valuable relationships – with affiliate access to newspapers, gravestone data, and the like. But honestly, in comparing WVR to sites like Ancestry, GenealogyBank, and many others I had my doubts about whether the company had a chance of making the big time. Then two things happened. They hired a go-getter by the name of Mark Olsen who had previously worked for Ancestry.com. He used his expertise to help stabilize their cash flow, and added a professionalism I was pleased to see. Then the company was purchased by MyHeritage.com – a highly successful genealogy website based in Israel. The merging of the two companies was a genealogy marriage made in heaven. MyHeritage had huge family trees, many with European, as well as American connections and World Vital Records had data (books and electronic databases).
This morning I decided I’d check out the MyHeritage Family Trees which are now available at WorldVitalRecords.com. After searching for new information on my Titus line, and coming up empty, I switched to looking for new data on my Keelers. I searched only within the Trees – searching for databases and vital records information I didn’t already now about. Sure enough, I immediately found data about my 4th great grandmother, Dinah Keeler – most of which I didn’t already have. Some isn’t sourced, but other items are. Beside that, I have the contact information of the folks that posted the data. One of the features of the Trees is that off to the right hand side, there is a column that says something like: “More Records for Dinah Keeler.” In this case it stated that there were 3 birth, marriage, and death records I could check out. Clicking on the link, I found a copy of the marriage of Dinah Keeler to my fourth great-grandfather, the so-called James Canfield (and that’s another story). I didn’t have this document, and it gave me the marriage date that I didn’t have previously. Now I’ve got a lot more data to prove, cousins to contact, and other sources to look at. One of the MyHeritage Trees also led me to extensive data and more trees located at GenCircles.com. I’ve certainly got my work cut out for me, thank to my search on WorldVitalRecords.com this morning.
