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Our twenty-seventh newsletter:
For Giving Tuesday, Reclaim The Records is giving you a present!
We won the New York marriage index, 1881-1965!
AND we filed a lawsuit to liberate the 1966-2017 data!
Happy Giving Tuesday from Reclaim The Records! We know your e-mail is probably overflowing today, full of appeals from non-profit organizations asking for your support. And we'll get to our own humble plea in a minute.
But first things first: let's talk about some new records that we've won and put online for free use AND a new lawsuit we just filed to get even more records!
We won the New York State Marriage Index for 1881-1965! And we're suing for 1966-2017! Because those records belong to the public, and we want them back.
These records used to only be available on scratched up old microfiche sheets at a small number of New York State public libraries, plus the Manhattan branch of the National Archives (NARA). But now we've put these images online at the Internet Archive for everyone to use, free of charge. No logins or subscriptions or paywalls, just freeeeee data for everyone, the way it ought to be.
Most years of this index combine all brides and grooms into the same annual file, sorted alphabetically by surname. But a few of the years separate out the brides and grooms into separate indices. And a few years sort the information by the Soundex code instead, as you can see in the example above.
All the digital images for 1881-1952 are online right now, and the rest of the data that we received through the mid-1960's will be added in the next few months. And if we win our lawsuit, eventually all the data up through 2017 will be online.
We originally submitted this Freedom of Information request to the New York State Department of Health (NYS DOH) back in September 2017. We were notified that we had won the request in mid-February 2018, and we received our portable hard drive with the records in mid-March 2018. (Yes, Ancestry did the microfiche scanning for the state, which is how they were able to quickly get a copy of the same images online behind their paywall a few months ago.)
So why didn't we mention this new successful records request until now?
Well, the problem is that we only received about 60% of what we'd asked for. Yes, we got thousands and thousands of files, but New York also withheld decades of data, and did it in a particularly dumb way that ignores several legal precedents. And that's not good enough. We want 100%. The public deserves 100%!
So we waited to announce this records win until we'd also filed the associated records lawsuit. Please, go check out our website and read the whole crazy story of how we won the marriage index, but then discovered that several decades of data was missing, forcing us to file a new request under a different name and then combine the two requests into a mega-lawsuit against the Department of Health. It's sure to be a modern classic in our new genre of Freedom of Information Horror Stories.
And yes, just to be clear, this also means that we at Reclaim The Records are currently running two different Freedom of Information lawsuits against the New York State Department of Health at the same time. The other lawsuit is the one about their communications with and about Ancestry, regarding possible preferential treatment when it comes to data requests. This one is more traditional, in that it's a "you guys have unpublished genealogical data and you need to give it back to the public, like now" type of lawsuit, if such a thing can be traditional.
So if you're keeping score at home, that means that Reclaim The Records now has five lawsuits running simultaneously:
- This lawsuit against the NYS DOH for the rest of the New York State marriage index, 1966-2017
- The other lawsuit against the NYS DOH over possible preferential treatment in records access
- Our first FOIA lawsuit, filed against the US Department of Veterans Affairs, for the BIRLS database
- Our loooong-running Missouri Sunshine Law case against the Missouri Department of Health and Senior Services for the state birth index 1910-2016 and the state death index 1965-2016 (happy second birthday to that case!)
- And another new lawsuit we filed last month but which we haven't mentioned in this newsletter yet...
And we have several more Freedom of Information projects simmering for major records databases, both state and federal, at least two of which will probably be turning into lawsuits by March 2019. #goals
And so, as promised, this is the part of this newsletter where we happen to mention that today is Giving Tuesday, which is when non-profit organizations (like us) ask the public for help and support. And we're asking you for that now.
We at Reclaim The Records are very, very, very thankful for the overwhelming support we've received from the community. Your donations help us keep fighting for records access. You help us target new records, and plan new legal strategies.
In addition to all our existing lawsuits, we have an ambitious agenda planned for 2019, set to launch many new records requests in several new states! And we're going after new federal records, too! But to do that, we really need your help.
For Giving Tuesday, there are a lot of ways you can show your support for open public records:
Reclaim The Records is an IRS-recognized 501(c)3 non-profit organization. Our EIN is 81-4985446. Your donation is tax-deductible in the United States to the amount allowed by law. And you know how much we love the law. 😉
Thank you supporting open records activism! We appreciate it so much.
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