our thirty-seventh mask-wearing newsletter

HELLO, YONKERS!

RECLAIM THE RECORDS WINS OUR FREEDOM OF INFORMATION FIGHT FOR
19^th + 20^th CENTURY BIRTH AND DEATH RECORDS FROM YONKERS, NEW YORK

THEIR FIRST-EVER PUBLIC AVAILABILITY, NOW ONLINE AND FREE!

Hello again from Reclaim The Records! We hope everybody has been hunkered down safely and soundly for the last few months, maybe working on some genealogy from home with some of the records we've helped release online over the past few years. Well, we're back to announce some great new records you might want to check out while you hunker in your bunker. And as always, these new records we've acquired and published are totally free.

After literally years of negotiating and haggling (although luckily stopping short of yet another lawsuit), we are pleased to announce the first-ever publication of tens of thousands of late nineteenth and early twentieth century births and deaths for Yonkers, New York. We've photographed the alphabetical indices, and for most years we were able to photograph the full birth and death registers, too!

And none of these record books had ever been available to the public to use or browse before, not even on microfilm at a library. And the people listed in these records were generally not in the statewide birth and death indices that we previously acquired and published for New York.

These photos are all new, and they're gorgeous:

Why Yonkers? Why now?

Back in 2017-18, we at Reclaim the Records spearheaded a successful project to acquire and publish the first-ever digitized copies of the New York State vital records indices. Those birth, marriage, and death indices were previously only available on old microfiche sheets at a handful of libraries and archives in New York State. They were faded and scratched, difficult and time-consuming to use, and were wildly inefficient in the modern world of digitization and machine-readable text.

We saw a brighter future, and after seventeen months of fighting and lawyering up against the New York State Department of Health, we successfully acquired and published these indices! For the first time ever, it was finally possible to search the names of all people who were born, married, and/or died in New York State (outside of New York City) during the genealogical timeframe, which as defined by New York’s regulations started around 1880-81.

And that was great. But this "state" index did not include the records from Buffalo, Yonkers, and Albany until about 1915 — and it never included records from New York City, which continues to be a separate vital records jurisdiction. If we wanted to be record completists (and we do!), we knew we had to go approach each of those cities individually to try to get access to their separately-held vital records, too. And so we did.

Beyond this hick town, Barnaby, there's a slick town, Barnaby

In September 2017, we submitted a Freedom of Information Law (FOIL) Request directly to the Yonkers City Clerk for their death index from its onset, which we thought started around 1880, up to the point at which the records should be reflected in the state index, around 1915. The Clerk’s office was slow to respond. Very slow.

Over the following six months, we exchanged multiple emails and phone calls, and they kept promising that they were working on the request. Finally, in April 2018, they told us that they were willing to grant us our request for copies of the records, but that the records still only existed in ledger book format and had apparently never been copied, microfilmed, or photographed, not even to make copies for safe keeping. We told them we'd be happy to send someone to do it, at no charge to the city at all. But after expressing our interest, they stopped answering us, again! They ignored e-mail after e-mail. This lasted for nearly another year!

As often happens when we tell these stories about dealing with government agencies, this was the point at which we decided to send in the lawyers.

We contacted our trusty and fearless counsel, and sent him copies of our eighteen months of correspondence, showing that the Yonkers City Clerk had "constructively denied our FOIL request" (that's the fancy legal phrasing) by failing to respond to us for such an egregiously long period of time. And on March 13, 2019, our attorney submitted our formal appeal of their careless FOIL denial, giving them ten days to respond and threatening a lawsuit. That seemed to do the trick. Over the next month or so, the Clerk's Office reluctantly responded to our lawyer, claiming that they needed more time to figure out which of this oddly-formatted and voluminous information was disclosable.

This was absurd, of course, because everything we were requesting was more than 100 years old. But the government will government. We decided to sit patiently for a few more weeks before initiating yet another Freedom of Information lawsuit.

Finally, in mid-2019, almost two years after submitting our original request, we had a nice substantive conversation with the Yonkers City Clerk’s Office, in which we negotiated a game plan to send somebody up to Yonkers to digitize the register books. We then tapped Jonathan Webb Deiss, our valiant board member who usually spends his days happily researching at the National Archives in Washington DC, to do the deed. He spent a few days in October 2019 sitting on the floor of a cramped office in Westchester County, photographing page after page of whatever record books the Clerk's Office would give us, with a DSLR camera and a tripod.

But even after all our pre-game conversations, the record books we ended up being allowed to photograph differed slightly from those upon we had originally agreed upon. In some respects, we got more than we asked for, but we believe there were also some books that were inadvertently kept back from us, and may still be legally accessible. We hope to return to Yonkers someday soon, once this awful pandemic passes, and, hopefully amicably, we intend to photograph the remainder of the books.

Yet our announcement is not that short, for they also allowed us to digitize birth records, which had not even been part of our original FOIL request! To our knowledge, these records may represent the largest collection of New York State birth registers that have ever been made available to the public without any kind of restrictions or usage agreements, and for that, we thank the City of Yonkers for allowing us to come in and make our history that much more accessible.

Here's what we acquired and what's online, and what's still left to photograph:

As always, we have published these collections on the Internet Archive, for free, for anyone to use, in any way they wish. The entirety of this collection is handwritten, meaning that we cannot use the OCR technology of the Internet Archive to make the records automatically text-searchable. For now, the only way to search these records is by manually browsing the indexes and looking for record numbers, or by flipping through the pages, which are in roughly chronological order. Luckily, the handwriting in the books is generally very good. You can also download the books entirely, if you prefer to have your own copy on your hard drive. We hope that organizations with an interest in New York genealogy will take up indexing projects so that these records can one day become a searchable database.

(In other words, these images will all probably end up as a text-searchable database on all your favorite genealogical websites within a year or two.)

And now comes the part where we talk about manure

We at Reclaim The Records figured out what records the government had, and what records the public did not have. And we pursued them for years, bringing in legal counsel to help us fight for our rights and our records when even our sweet-talking phone calls and persistent barrage of e-mails was not enough. And then we took our people and our cameras to the books, rather than waiting for them to come to us, to make sure these photos finally happened. And then we put it all online, and didn't charge anyone a dime. It all took far longer than it should have needed to for such a legally-obvious outcome, but sometimes that's what we have to do when reclaiming records.

And now they'll be online forever, and can be useful to the public, instead of sitting and decaying in a big metal safe in a Yonkers office, inaccessible for no good reason, for one hundred and forty-five years!

(Check our math: 2020 minus 1875 [the first year of these records] is 145 years!)

We're so glad we took on this project and reclaimed these records, and we hope you are too. And if you are, we'd really love to have your financial support, so we can keep on reclaiming more records from more states and cities and towns, large and small, and fill in all the gaps where we don't have any public copies of our historical records at all.

But we need your help to keep doing that.

A famous (albeit fictional) Yonkers resident who lived in the same time period that these new books cover was a businessman named Horace Vandergelder. And he once said to the even more famous Mrs. Dolly Gallagher Levi:

"You see, Dolly, I've always felt that money, pardon the expression, is like manure. It's not worth a thing unless you spread it around."

Well, we here at Reclaim The Records hope you'll want to spread it around, too.

You can make a donation to our work on our website, through our Facebook page, or by check:

From all of us at Reclaim the Records, thank you for your support!