World Vital Records Announces Partnership with SmallTownPapers®, Inc.: New partnership will make several million names available at World Vital Records

Provo, UT, September 13, 2006 --(PR.com)-- World Vital Records is pleased to announce a partnership today with SmallTownPapers, Inc, a newspaper archive company featuring small town newspapers and articles. This relationship will result in World Vital Records and its users having access to a new source for historical information from small towns across the country.

“World Vital Records’ experience and progressive business model make it an ideal distribution partner for SmallTownPapers. Our content is unique and exclusive so we selected a company with the vision and experience to deliver our extensive archive of newspapers from small town to the widest possible audience,” said Paul Jeffko, president and founder of SmallTownPapers, Inc.

“We are excited to be associated with World Vital Records as it develops a new model which will make our content widely available to genealogists and researchers through the company’s free and subscription services.” 

SmallTownPapers provides access to more than 300 small market newspapers from across the dating back as far as 1865.  Newspapers in small towns historically confined their archives to bound volumes tucked away in storage. Locating information from the past often required the time-consuming activity of traveling to the town and physically searching through often fragile, bound newspaper pages.  SmallTownPapers provides high quality, completely searchable digital images of the newspapers which appear just as the newspaper was printed.

"SmallTownPapers provides a great service for family historians," said Paul Allen, World Vital Records CEO. "They make it possible for individuals to find obituary, birth, and marriage announcements in old newspapers. Such discoveries are exciting and create powerful emotional connections to the past. We are excited to partner with such a dedicated and knowledgeable company and we look forward to a long relationship."

###

Media Contact: 
Whitney Ransom
Director, Corporate Communications
WorldVitalRecords.com
whitney@worldvitalrecords.com

About WorldVitalRecords.com
Finding your ancestors can be overwhelming, and expensive. At WorldVitalRecords.com, we've made it easy and affordable for individuals to connect to their families and find answers to their genealogical questions. Led by Paul Allen, who after founding Ancestry.com, which became the largest genealogy company in the world, now aims to be the number two player in the genealogy industry with WorldVitalRecords.com. WorldVitalRecords.com will offer users international record databases, references to top genealogical resources, a blog planet, podcasts, videocasts, Webinars, expert advice, training, and user-generated content.

About SmallTownPapers®, Inc
SmallTownPapers is an online gateway to newspapers from small town — past and present. Working with publishers from across the country, the company digitally scans current and archived newspapers and then provides online access. Through the SmallTownPapers website, the newspaper archives can be searched by keyword or phrase and viewed as originally printed. SmallTownPapers, Inc. is based in Seattle, WA. For more information visit www.smalltownpapers.com.