Friday, May 6, 2011

Recently Added Collections to WorldVitalRecords.com

I go visit each of the commercial genealogy websites occasionally to see what historical record collections have been added over the past month or so.

I checked out www.WorldVitalRecords.com today (Note: this is a subscription website) and noticed that they have a new website design:


That looks pretty nice, and the blue menu bar has  "Home," "View all Databases," "Search," "Places," "Store," and "My Account" options.

I found the link to the "Recently Added Databases" under the "Search" menu button:


I like this list - it is in Date Added order, and alphabetical within the date order.  Looking at the list, they added on 5 May 2011:

*  A number of small city and large City Directories (but not entire collections).
*  Official Army Registers for 1856-1969 (not every year, but most)
*  Parish Registers from many English counties (not complete, they are printed transcriptions)
*  Many miscellaneous English books about families and records

I found San Diego City Directories for 1936 to 1959 here (not every year, but most)

On 20 April 2011, they added:

*  Many college and high school Yearbooks (one or several from many places, not complete collections)

This collection included San Diego High School for 1929 and San Diego Junior College for 1955.  There are quite a few Yearbooks from the U.S. Air Force Academy, U.S. Coast Guard Academy, U.S. Merchant Marine Academy, U.S. Military Academy West Point, and the U.S. Naval Academy.

The only problem I had using this "Recently Added Databases" page was that I had to go use the "Search" menu item and the "Recently Added Databases" link to get back to the list of the databases.

The overall list of the available databases is at http://www.worldvitalrecords.com/contentsearch.aspx.

I have seen no publicity about these significant additions to the list of WorldVitalRecords collection.  I no longer receive the WVR newsletter via email for some reason - did they discontinue that?  There are no press releases from WVR about their website content, either. 

Disclosure:  I have a www.WorldVitalRecords.com subscription that I paid for myself.

1 comment:

paulcito said...

Dear Randy,
With the current signup offer to join WVR, I was wondering if you could speak to how it compares to GenealogyBank in your experience, for newspaper searches?

I haven't found any way at WVR to view the individual paper titles in their Newspaper Collection, which looks to me like one of the main attractions of subscribing, the other collections they have seem to be available elsewhere, such as the SSDI, Findagrave, censuses, etc.
Thanks, your opinion and exhaustive research of genealogy software is always appreciated.