Whitney Ransom

WorldVitalRecords.com experienced its first parade yesterday in Logan, Utah. It was a great experience. There were several thousand people in attendance at the parade, and it was really neat to hear the reactions people had to our tagline that said, “Building the #2 Genealogy Site.”

Here are a few pictures from the parade:

Jared McKenzie ties the WorldVitalRecords.com banner to his pickup, in preparation for the big 24th of July parade.

Shown from left to right: Amy Rhoads, Director of Research and Development and Community Building; Jared McKenzie, Parade Driver, WorldVitalRecords.com fan; Whitney Ransom, Director of Corporate Communications

Shown from left to right: Darla Seamons, Director of Content Acquisition; Jared McKenzie; Yvette Arts, Executive Vice President

During the parade, several members of our team passed out flyers about our Web site. We also announced a contest we are having. Here are the details:

Pioneering into the Future Contest

Show your pioneer spirit and break new ground by uploading a photo at WorldVitalRecords.com. You will receive one entry for every old photo (before 1950) you upload to WorldVitalRecords.com from July 25-until midnight on August 25. (There is no limitation on the number of photos an individual can submit.) Winner will receive a gift certificate to have 25 scanned photos for FREE and will be notified on August 26. Check out the rest of the contest details at this URL: http://www.worldvitalrecords.com/training.html

We are excited to receive these photos, which of course, will remain in our free section, visible to anyone who wishes to view them.

Today is the big day for our first newsletter launch! Hooray! Just to give you a sneak preview, some of the items we will be talking about will include a section on what you can expect at WorldVitalRecords.com, the meaning of the word “vital” in our company name, a section about some of the databases we have launched, as well as the datasets we will launch the rest of the week. We have also highlighted what you can do with geocoded SSDI data. I better stop before I share everything that will be in the newsletter. Look for it later today on our Web site. If you prefer, you can also sign up to receive it by sending an email to <subscribe@worldvitalrecords.com>.

The second piece of exciting news is that tomorrow WorldVitalRecords.com will be switching over to a different management system. This statement means a lot to our programs, and to users, well, check out our site tomorrow, and also read our blog in which we will talk about the new functionality.

Last, but certainly not least, we launched the Florida land records dataset today, containing 81,560 records. What is the importance of these land records? One reason is that they can be useful to researchers in helping them place an individual in a certain time and place, connecting them with families and neighborhoods. It also provides additional context into the life of your ancestor. That’s right, one land record could help you determine the history of the area in which your family lived (perhaps even the exact house), the neighbors that lived nearby, as well as the stores where they shopped. Land records certainly provide rich information that can be vital to your genealogy.

We are launching a really “famous” database today at WorldVitalRecords.com. Yes, today you will actually be able to search for records on influential people such as Benjamin Franklin, Emily Dickinson, and Albert Einstein. This new database includes nearly 40,000 records of famous people who have pages in the Wikipedia. Perhaps you’re counting the number of famous people, and you’re thinking, “Certainly there must be more than
40, 000 records in the Wiki.” Of course there are. Today we are just launching records for famous people whose first names begin with the letters A-H. (We’ll launch I-Q this Friday, and R-Z on July 27.)

While we’re on the topic of notable people we should remember, next Monday we will be at the 24^th of July parade, in Logan Utah, celebrating our pioneer heritage. We can’t wait to get our handcart ready, announce a new data set, and share our theme: “WorldVitalRecords.com: Pioneering into the Future”. We hope to see you there!

Why travel to Logan for the Pioneer Day Celebration? Here are a couple of reasons.

First of all, Logan has a great parade and a variety of festivities (fireworks, fun run, rodeo, sports tournaments, etc.). The parade will include everything from horse-drawn wagons and buggies to floats and fancy cars from commercial, community, civic, and non-profit organizations.

Second, after the parade, we are going to visit our friends at Everton Publishing.

Finally, I am from Preston, Idaho (Napoleon Dynamite territory), and we may just have to take a little tour to see if Napoleon and Pedro are also celebrating Pioneer Day.

We’re happy that people are coming to WorldVitalRecords.com and appreciate the feedback we have received. Although we are a small genealogy player at the moment, we are steadily adding content.

Since July 5, we have added 77 million 358, 000 records to WorldVitalRecords.com. Here is the breakdown:

Today, we are launching 260, 000 Alabama Land records.

Yesterday we launched 98,000 pre-1908 Ohio land records. These records document the transfer of land ownership from the federal government to individuals.

The day of our launch we added 77 million records, including the SSDI All of these records are geocoded, allowing users to visually see the city and neighboring counties on a map where their ancestors lived.

According to Alexa rankings, our reach per million users today was 20 million, and our three month change in our reach is 740 percent. And just in case you wanted to know, our average reach this week has been 27 per million viewers.

How are these rankings calculated? Alexa calculates reach by expressing it as a percentage of all Internet users who visit a particular site. Alexa computes the average weekly reach and compares it with the average reach during previous weeks for each Internet site.

Reach measures the number of users. Reach is typically expressed as the percentage of all Internet users who visit a given site. So, for example, if a site like yahoo.com has a reach of 28%, this means that if you took random samples of one million Internet users, you would on average find that 280,000 of them visit yahoo.com. Alexa expresses reach as number of users per million. Alexa’s one-week and three-month average reach are measures of daily reach, averaged over the specified time period. The reach rank is a ranking of all sites based solely on their reach. The three-month changes are determined by comparing a site’s current reach and reach rank with its values from three months ago. - Alexa

As the corporate communications director at WorldVital Records.com, I have been receiving a lot of emails lately with people asking how much it is going to cost to have a subscription at WorldVitalRecords.com.  In fact, one woman just sent me an email and said, Just wondering… are you going to be like other genealogy companies that have become unaffordable to me? I want to answer this question as clearly as possible. NO!
 
One of our purposes for building WorldVitalRecords.com is to provide a site that is affordable to people. I think it is ludicrous that people have to spend thousands of dollars trying to find their family members. I mean, can Jim really help it if his great, great great, great, grandmother was from Ireland, and unfortunately, to access that particular database containing the records he is seeking, he has to pay the equivalency of a plane ticket to travel to that country. It’s just not right.
 
We will not discourage people from doing their genealogy/family history work because of outrageous subscription prices. Currently we are working on our subscription model. For now, all of our content is free! (And we will always have some free content on our site.)
 
If you haven’t seen WorldVitalRecords.com, I encourage you to check it out. Our Alexa ranking, which shows daily page views was at 0 on June 28^th and rose to 8 million on the day we launched our site (July 5)!  Are we excited? Yes! Are we going to keep subscription prices low? Yes!
 

This past weekend I went to the Stadium of Fire in Provo, Utah. It was really a great show. They had a variety of entertainment, ranging from skydivers, performances from American Idol, Taylor Hicks and Lee Ann Womack, and the fireworks. The Pentagon had also selected the Stadium of Fire as the exclusive broadcast to troops throughout the world through the Armed Forces Network.

My favorite part of the show was when the announcer told the audience that there was a soldier in Afghanistan who would be able to speak to his family (who were attending the Stadium of Fire performance) by satellite broadcast. Apparently the soldier had been fighting in Afghanistan for eight months. The man was projected on the screen, and the family members began to speak to him from the stadium. They seemed so excited to finally get the chance to talk to him. We could hear and see the soldier from the stadium, but he just kept responding with, “I can’t hear you. I just can’t hear you.” It was kind of a devastating moment. The family finally had the chance to talk with this soldier, and he couldn’t even hear them because of some problems with the broadcast. Then, the screen went black, and this soldier came out to the front of the stadium. It was such a beautiful moment. The family members embraced after eight months of not being able to see one another. Tears streamed down my face. A family had been reunited.

I couldn’t help but think that this type of “reuniting” is what we are trying to do at WorldVitalRecords.com. We want people to have these same types of experiences with their loved whom perhaps they haven’t seen for perhaps hundreds of years. We want to provide people with the information and resources to connect with their families.

I really believe that there is something within all of us that just longs to know the people who are related to us and those who came before us so we can have a better understanding of who we are. Indeed, there is something innate within all of us that creates a desire to know our families and to be connected with them. We want this connectivity.

I was talking with an individual last week, and during the course of our conversation, she mentioned the term “divine rendezvous”. She was basically saying that there are specific times in our lives when we are directed to make connections with certain people. As she was saying these words, I started thinking about the some of the divine rendezvous I have made where I work.

I have been employed at Provo Labs, which is an incubator for Web 2.0 Internet companies. Paul Allen, the founder of MyFamily.com and Ancestry.com is the CEO, and I have learned much from him about Internet marketing, business, and innovation. He is a great man, and is listed in my category of divine rendezvous.

Recently my love of genealogy and family history has increased immensely as we have been preparing to launch WorldVitalRecords.com (A spin-off company of Provo Labs). You may have seen our site before, but we are re “vitalizing” it right now. Our launch was scheduled for yesterday. Unfortunately that didn’t happen. We had some problems on the development side (Lesson learned: Back up anything that is even remotely important to you, and then do it again, just in case.) Big sigh…

Of course, we have some excellent people at WorldVitalRecords.com who are working diligently to get everything ready, including David Lifferth, who used to work at MyFamily.com/Ancestry.com as a content engineer, John Ivie, who also worked at Ancestry, and Richard Stauffer, who is just a genius “back end” person.

I also get to work closely with some amazing people, including Yvette Arts, Executive Vice President; Darla Seamons, Director, Content Acquisition; Amy Rhoads, Director of Research and Development and Community Building; and Kory Hoopes, Front-End Designer. I will talk about these individuals in greater depth later. In the meantime, you can check out their blogs.

I can’t wait for WorldVitalRecords.com to be ready and accessible to everyone. Here is a little bit about our plans for the site:

“WorldVitalRecords.com aims to be the number two genealogy player. The site will include a vast library of genealogical resources, including international genealogy databases, references to top genealogical resources, a blog planet, podcasts, videocasts, Webinars, expert advice, training, and user-generated content.”

I’m sure WorldVitalRecords.com will become a place where individuals can have divine rendezvous, a place where they can connect with loved ones, discover who their ancestors are, and in the process, learn more about themselves. If anyone is interested in helping us build the number two genealogy site in the world, please send an email to content (at) worldvitalrecords.com.