Obituaries are very important to genealogy research and sometimes reveal information that can’t be found anywhere else.

And now, a new website not only offers access to obituary information that dates back to the 1930’s, but it’s also promising to forever change the way people access obits and memorialize those who have been important to them.

Tributes.com touts itself as a centralized web destination that makes obituary and memorial service information easily and reliably searchable, while creating a safe place where families and communities can come together to share the treasured stories of those who have passed.

Launched as a beta site in February, Tributes.com reports that hundreds of thousands of visitors have already come to the site.

The website’s founder is no stranger to big web ventures. Jeff Taylor is also known for the mega job search site Monster.com and the baby Boomers social networking site Eons.com.

“I first formulated the idea for Tributes.com after recognizing how popular the obituary section was on Eons.com,” said Taylor. “Around the same time, I found out that my mother was not only a regular reader of the obituary section in her metro daily newspaper, but that she also read the obituaries in her hometown weekly paper on the off chance someone she knew had passed away. It made me recognize the need for an easier method of keeping track of those you care about and a more dynamic and personal way to honor and celebrate lives — thus was born Tributes.com.”

The key to Tributes.com success is to align itself with funeral homes across the country to provide national distribution for the obituaries they publish. Tributes will, in turn, supply funeral homes with a wide range of personalized, online, multi-media memorial products they can offer to families to help them more effectively capture and immortalize the artifacts, stories and sentiments that are discovered and shared at the time of a death.
   
Among other features, Tributes also allows users to receive email alerts about obituaries by location, name, education, workplace or military duty.       

Tributes.com boasts of having more than 83 million current and historical death records dating back to the 1930’s on its site.