NewspaperARCHIVE.com Partners With World Vital Records

The following is an announcement written by NewspaperARCHIVE and World Vital Records Inc.:

Provo, UT -- 08/28/2007 -- NewspaperARCHIVE.com, the largest newspaper database available online, has partnered with World Vital Records Inc.’s Web sites (WorldVitalRecords.com and FamilyLink.com) in a unique way to provide increased access to a half billion records from newspapers ranging from 1759-1923.

"Historical newspapers contain valuable information about our ancestors, which may not have been preserved in any other form. By making these records easily accessible, we hope they can become a part of someone's family history," said Jeff Kiley, General Manager, NewspaperARCHIVE.com.

The uniqueness of this partnership stems from the way in which World Vital Records, Inc. will extract vital record information from the newspapers and place it on its site.

“We wanted to have vital record information from early American newspapers. NewspaperARCHIVE.com has allowed us to extract this information from their newspapers that cover the first 160-years of their collection,” said Yvette Arts, Director, Content Acquisition, World Vital Records, Inc.

With this partnership, NewspaperARCHIVE.com will provide several million pages of vital record data (approximately a half-billion online records), which will be available for subscribers at WorldVitalRecords.com.

“In my mind, this collection of newspapers is as valuable as the censuses because it contains similar information, with the occasional benefit of additional family data. I’m really excited about this partnership and for the increased access it will allow our viewers to experience,” said David Lifferth, President, World Vital Records, Inc.

Once the material from NewspaperARCHIVE.com has been launched, the data will be available for free at WorldVitalRecords.com for a ten-day period. The first release of the data will include 40 million records. Subsequent releases will follow totaling more than a half-billion records. Some links to the data will also be available at FamilyLink.com (World Vital Records Inc.’s new genealogy social network).

“Reading these newspapers from the 18th and 19th centuries are the closest we can get to actually experiencing that time period ourselves. Whether a newspaper helps to uncover a birth record or simply someone's life profession, it can provide valuable facts that help solve those unanswered questions,” said Leslie Fredericks-Leamon, Web Marketing Strategist, NewspaperARCHIVE.com.

About NewspaperARCHIVE.com
NewspaperARCHIVE.com, the largest historical newspaper database online, contains tens of millions of newspaper pages from 1759 to present. Every newspaper in the archive is fully searchable by keyword and date, making it easy to quickly explore historical content. NewspaperARCHIVE.com adds newspaper pages faster than one can search them - with one newspaper page added every second - that’s over 80,000 images a day, or about 2.5 million pages per month! Designed for any individual of any age or profession, NewspaperARCHIVE.com provides a comfortable and safe environment with easy-to-use tools for fast searching and browsing. NewspaperARCHIVE.com is owned by Heritage Microfilm of Cedar Rapids, Iowa, and began in 1999.

About World Vital Records, Inc.
Founded in 2006, by Paul Allen and several key members of the original Ancestry.com team, World Vital Records, Inc. provides affordable genealogy databases and family history networking tools. With thousands of databases including birth, death, military, census, and parish records, WorldVitalRecords.com makes it easy for everyone and enjoyable to discover their family history. World Vital Records’ free social network for genealogists, FamilyLink.com, is currently in beta testing. Partners include Everton Publishers, Quintin Publications, The Statue of Liberty-Ellis Island Foundation, Inc., SmallTownPapers®, Accessible Archives, Ancestral Quest, Find A Grave, and FamilySearch™.

Comments

[Randy Seaver]

This certainly adds a major database to WorldVitalRecords collection of data, and opens a major competition with Ancestry, since they also access NewspaperArchive. It makes WVR much more attractive to a non-Ancestry subscriber (and to future FHL/FHC users), but adds no real incentive to subscribe to WVR if someone is an Ancestry subscriber.

If the WVR search capability is better than Ancestry's, it might be another selling point for WVR. Ancestry's search engine is horrendous for this database - you have to search the whole page for the search words. We'll see.

[Happy Dae]

Well, that does it! I am heading over to World Vital Records today. But, PLEASE, no more good news!! I can't afford it anymore! Not to mention the time I'm currently spending online perusing all these databases. Gracious.

Happy Dae.
http://www.ShoeStringGenealogy.com/ssg1.htm

[Kenneth Herrmann]

Genealogy is frustrating, challenging passion that I love to hate.

[Marjorie]

I tried the WorldVitalRecords.com search engine supposedly specifically for the resource Kegly's Virginia Frontier. In the "family nme" box I entered Short. The only hits were in phrases like "Short hill," "came up short," and similar. No family names at all. My conclusion is that their search engine isn't very robust and is misleading about what it can do. So much for the so-called "family name" search.

[Richard Heaton]

There are a number of Newspaper Digitalisation projects - The London Gazette, the excellent index to the Times Newspaper by Thomson Gale, the Scotsman, and most recently I checked the New Zealand National Library site (the indexing might not have been as good as some users might have hoped for but for a rare surname I found it excellent!) - but coming up will be - for those of us on the other side of the pond - potentially the most impressive project - the British Newspaper Libraries project to make available a good slice regional titles from 1800 - 1900 and we may also see the Burney Collection available in a similar format.
As a keen user, collector, and transcriber, seeing resources like this being made available - frequently free to use - its a great time to be a family or social historian !
Best Regards
Richard Heaton

[J Peevey]

What about Canadian Newspapers?

[Richard Heaton]

For Canadian Newspapers Pro Quest (Globe and Mail / Toronto Star) or Paper of Record (which has a huge number of Canadian Titles) and there is a project to make newspapers from Alberta available (Our Future Our Past) it doesn't appear to be OCR though - so you need to search by Date oe Place and read the relevant papers.

As a general comment your searching success will depend upon the way the paper was indexed - for example searching for a surname (or occuption) Ranger, if capitalisation was ignored e.g. ranger, you may find yourself looking at loads of st[ranger]s - who may be interesting but probably not related.

Regards
Richard Heaton

[Ruth Sprowls]

I have subscribed to Newspaperarchive.com for a couple of years. When I first subscribed I was elated - what success I had in locating obits and other articles for my research. I had loads of hits for my surname searches and the little blurbs they gave you with a hit were very helpful in deciding whether I wanted that article or not. Then this past year they started playing with the search engine and garbling the words in the blurb, so that NOW you have to click on the article, pull it up in acrobat reader and then see if it is pertitent. Many times is just nothing of value. Before you could locate an article by searching a surname with the initials of first and middle names (ex: I.N. HOUSE). The search would be EXACT - now, if I key in I.N. HOUSE - engine searches for In House - imagine the hits on that one - I have complained, and been given a complimentary 1 month free - they are getting better, but it is not like it was before. I have even taken articles I printed out previously and tried locate them with no success. But in speaking with friends, the blurbs for hits are much less garbled than at ancestry.com.