Recently LaRae Kerr announced the Great Gratitude Awards in the Daily Herald, Utah County’s Leading Newspaper, and WorldVitalRecords.com was a recipient! The Great Gratitude Awards were given to a “barn full of Web sites and one genealogy organization.”

Here are LaRae’s comments from the Great Gratitude Award article about WorldVitalRecords.com:

Another new Web site, WorldVitalRecords.com, which was launched in October 2006, just three months before Footnote.com, also receives a Great Gratitude Award. This site carries small-town newspapers, the Everton Collection, international parish registers and much more for a great monthly or yearly price. WorldVitalRecords partners with the Godfrey Memorial Library and other organizations. It also provides members with FamilyLink and We’reRelated on Facebook, services that connect families and friends.

Click here to view the entire Great Gratitude Awards article.

On a personal note, I recently met LaRae Kerr for the first time at the St. George Genealogy Expo. LaRae has written in various journals and has been doing genealogy for 48 years! She is very knowledgeable, charismatic, and really cares about helping individuals connect with their families through genealogical work.

WorldVitalRecords.com is honored to receive this award. Thank you, LaRae!

Recently, DearMYRTLE.com (http://blog.dearmyrtle.com/) announced the Internet for Genealogists Awards. These awards are given to honor excellent work. DearMYRTLE.com ranked WorldVitalRecords.com as the number 1 database site. Besides the top database site category, the Internet for Genealogists Award also includes the following categories: blog, instruction, scanned image site, podcast, video, commentary, innovation, most interesting thread, and ethnic studies. The Internet for Genealogists Awards has been a feature that began in 1995 as a column in one of Myrt’s Sunday postings.

Here is the comment from DearMYRTLE.com’s site about WorldVitalRecords.com:

DATABASE SITE: WorldVitalRecords.com, already expanding an impressive US collection of genealogy data, WVR will release releasing tomorrow the new World Collection mentioned in my previous blog entry. Paul Allen’s projects never fail to amaze me. –DearMYRTLE, Your friend in genealogy.

Click here to view the full blog post.

For those of you who are unfamiliar with DearMYRTLE.com, Myrt (the author of DearMYRTLE.com launched her site in 1998, although the site began to be popular in 1999. She is a well known and respected genealogist. Myrt’s work appears in various places such as Myrt’s The Everything Online Genealogy Book (published in 2000), Heritage Quest Magazine, and Everton’s Genealogical Helper. She has also published small books such as, Getting Started with Your Family History and Internet Research: Top 20 Things to Do Online. And Journals & Personal Histories: A Weekly Plan for Success.

Myrt claims that the purpose of her site is to “engage our minds in a conversation of sorts – stimulating thought and jogging us out of our respective genealogy research ruts.”

DearMyrtle.com ranked WorldVitalRecords.com as the number 1 database site for the best of the Internet for Genealogists Award for the week!

Here is the comment from DearMyrtle’s site:
DATABASE SITE: WorldVitalRecords.com, already expanding an impressive US collection of genealogy data, WVR will release releasing tomorrow the new World Collection mentioned in my previous blog entry. Paul Allen’s projects never fail to amaze me.

Happy family tree climbing! Myrt

DearMYRTLE, Your friend in genealogy.

http://blog.dearmyrtle.com/

Click here to view the full blog post.

WorldVitalRecords.com wishes to extend congratulations to Kristin Thomson who became WorldVitalRecords.com’s 20,00th subscriber last Friday!!!

“I am excited about finding out about WorldVitalRecords and anticipate it will be a great help in getting me up and going again and in my continued research, particularly in Indiana, Kansas, Germany and England,” Kristin said.

Kristin has been doing family history work for more than 25 years. She has an associate’s degree in Genealogy, a bachelor’s of science in Family and Community History and a master’s in Library and Information Sciences.

“I have always liked history. My family was from Europe, so I thought European history was a nice focus to study. I am also the main person who does genealogy, so it put a lot of responsibility on my shoulders to do the work. However, my family has been very cooperative when I have asked them questions. My siblings are always interested when I learn new things or find information about our family and our ancestors,” Kristin said.

After graduation at age 50, Kristin served an internship in the Family History Library in Salt Lake City and has worked in other public libraries as a reference librarian, always taking the chance to interest patrons in any genealogical materials housed in the library or online.

“Family History is exciting, and I look forward to working and researching as the field opens wider with new and improved and ever changing products and helps,” Kristin said.

Kristin has also served in her local Family History Center (where she heard about WorldVitalRecords.com) off and on for about 10 years.

“I think my favorite thing about family history is that you can just immerse yourself in it, and kind of forget the world. It’s fun to see what you can come up with in just a few minutes of searching,” Kristin said. “For me, family history is a way that I can relax and not feel guilty about not getting the floor vacuumed, or other things that I think are important. I can’t sit down in the middle of the day and read a book, but I can sit down and do genealogy because I feel its worthwhile.”