One sign of the growing popularity of genealogy in general — and online genealogy in particular — is the entrance into the field of established players from other parts of the electronic-information universe. NewsBank, for example, has been supplying information products to public and academic libraries for more than 35 years. It offers libraries and other institutions searchable databases that include more than 2,000 newspapers, plus newswires, transcripts, business journals, periodicals, government documents and other publications. Now NewsBank is turning its attention to the genealogy market, offering individual consumers online access to millions of records from its digital vaults for a $19.95-per-month introductory price.

GenealogyBank <www.genealogybank.com>, NewsBank's new service for family historians, promises digital images of pages from 100,000 books, 22 million obituaries from more than 700 newspapers, thousands of historical documents and a growing full-text collection of old newspapers. NewsBank also will market the service to its library customers as America's GenealogyBank. The company has the resources and database expertise to challenge Ancestry.com <Ancestry.com >, particularly Ancestry's Historical Newspaper Collection and Obituary Collection.