The US National Archives teamed up with Footnote, Inc. to publish their digitized holdings for the amateur and professional researchers. I read it on the EOGN site, I bet other blogs would comment on it, too.

This growing collection will be interesting for the American researcher with Hungarian ancestry as the stacks contain naturalization records and petitions already, and more will follow for sure. The casual researcher can buy an image for $1.99, while seasoned genealogists might be more interested in the monthly and annual subscriptions.

Paul Allen and his team has been up to something since their public launch back in October 2006. The goal of WorldVitalRecords is to become the number 2 genealogy company in the world.

Paul is one of the founding fathers of Ancestry.com (now The Generations Network), the actual number one family history company. He left Ancestry because it didn't stay "true to the vision that we created for it in the early years." Now he has many from the original team at MyFamily with him.

OK, now to the beef, as much as Hungarian ancestry research is concerned. WVR seem to be aiming at the long tail. In one discussion Paul mentioned that: "I was going to say ... as we launch our locality searching, we will analyze queries to see which locations are NOT giving good results [and then we will focus on content acquisition for those locations...the more obscure the better". And they do mean international records, too: World Vital Records Seeks Individuals to be on International Advisory Boards.

In fact, I contacted Yvette with my tentative interest of the Hungarian side, and I might get their information pack one day.

A month ago WVR blog announced that they began to scan millions of family history records at the Everton library. Beyond the sheer mentioning of Hungary and Romania, the blog entry of Dec 29 revealed more about the nature of the first records to come: Hungarian land records are mentioned there.

One spotted international item already published on WVR is a tip showing how Slovakian family vital records link generations.

It'd be interesting to see if there could be a bunch of people contributing Hungary-related datasets, either on a non-for-profit, voluntary basis, or as business deals with WVR.