Here are the slides to our lecture to the National Genealogical Society (NGS) annual conference – May 2018:
Here’s the slide deck from our lecture in April 2017, in Cleveland:
Here’s the slide deck from our lecture in December 2016, in New York:
Going to have to tweet this one again.
No, no reason.
Pro tip: certain political commentators ought to refrain from ugly attempts at birtherism, not merely because it’s gross, but also because it’s extra-dumb when certain political candidates come from open records states where all birth certificate copies are open to the public.
Pro tip: certain political commentators ought to refrain from ugly attempts at birtherism, not merely because it’s gross, but also because it’s extra-dumb when certain political candidates come from open records states where all birth certificate copies are open to the public.
Here's a way for @nycgovhistory @nycrecords to build a lot of goodwill: Allow @FamilySearch to display NYC records online so we can continue our research while we can't travel to NYC or go to Family History Centers to access them ourselves. #Genealogy @ReclaimTheRecs
The Kansas Legislature is absolutely insane for exempting ALL vital records from the Kansas Open Records act. Using “identity theft” as an excuse just to make more money. I really wish more historians/genealogists were in government instead of the greedy fools we have now.
Kansas definitely deserves a lawsuit from @ReclaimTheRecs
You annual reminder that the "England and Wales, Death Index, 1989-2019” on Ancestry is not the GRO index and is not a comprehensive record set. (It was updated this month to include records from 2019).
Out: doing genealogy in open records states like California where uncertified "informational" copies of anyone's birth certificate are totally available to the public, with no embargo periods
In: doing genealogy by listening to clues in Taylor Swift songs
https://www.popsugar.com/family/blake-lively-ryan-reynolds-third-baby-name-46728431?utm_medium=twitter&utm_source=post&utm_campaign=frontdoor
Some perks of the new job... discovering records I didn't know about! Today's accidental finds include a list of cultural figures the Gestapo planned to arrest on invasion (Virginia Woolf 😮) and a report on child labourers that inspired Charles Dickens to write A Christmas Carol
Uh-oh. Sophisticated phishing attack in progress against GedMatch users, whose data was apparently harvested. They are now being sent phony DNA and “Ethnicity Estimate” e-mails from domains that *look* like MyHeritage and possibly 23andMe and Ancestry.
https://blog.myheritage.com/2020/07/security-alert-malicious-phishing-attempt-detected-possibly-connected-to-gedmatch-breach/
@IPatNYL @WomenInAutism @ReclaimTheRecs MyHeritage are indicating that a phishing attack is using emails taken from a GedMatch site. So possible other data may have been acquired as well.
https://blog.myheritage.com/2020/07/security-alert-malicious-phishing-attempt-detected-possibly-connected-to-gedmatch-breach/
HELLO, YONKERS! Reclaim The Records has won our Freedom of Information fight for the birth and death records from Yonkers, New York! They’re now online, and free!
After literally years of negotiating and haggling (although luckily stopping short of yet another lawsuit), we are pleased to announce this first-ever publication of tens of thousands of late nineteenth and early twentieth century births and deaths for Yonkers. 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.
Click here to read our latest newsletter with all the details, and with direct links to all the now-online record books, which span from roughly 1875 to 1916, with a few gaps:
mailchi.mp/reclaimtherecords/reclaim-the-records-wins-lawsuit-for-missouri-state-birth-index-and-…
Thanks to our attorney Dave Rankin for handling all the legal paperwork that finally got the Yonkers City Clerk’s Office to stop messing around and give the public our rightful access to these important historical records. And a special shout-out to our intrepid RTR board member Jonathan Webb Deiss for going on a road trip last October to laboriously photograph these books for us.
And if you’re happy to see these kinds of free (and copyright-free) historical records go online, we hope you’ll consider making a donation to support our work — so that we can do more of it, and reclaim more records for more towns and cities and states.
Enjoy!
Our groundbreaking Sunshine Law victory against the state of Missouri, in our fight for copies of the birth index and death index, is making headlines around the country! Here’s Pulitzer Prize winner Tony Messenger of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, who has covered our story for four years as part of his beat, with a new column about the dénouement:
www.stltoday.com/news/local/columns/tony-messenger/messenger-judge-blasts-state-of-missouri-over-…
🎉 WE WON! WE WON! 🎉 We won our long-running Sunshine Law case for the Missouri birth index 1920-2015 and the Missouri death index 1968-2015! These text indices are going to go online for free public use, both searchable and downloadable, and they’ll never be locked up by the state again!
And we were also awarded our attorneys fees by the judge! And those will probably be in the low six figures. Thanks, Missouri taxpayers!
And we even were awarded FINES against the Missouri Department of Health and Senior Services, for their four separate "knowing and purposeful" violations of the law! Fines are very hard to get, and as far as we know, no one’s ever won MULTIPLE fines against a state agency in a Missouri Sunshine Law case before. But we did!
MWAHAHAHAHAHA! 😁
Read all about it in our latest newsletter:
mailchi.mp/reclaimtherecords/reclaim-the-records-wins-lawsuit-for-missouri-state-birth-index-and-…
Or you can jump right to the judge’s fifty-three page order, in our Motion for Summary Judgment here (PDF):
www.reclaimtherecords.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/reclaim_the_records_vs_missouri_dhss_-_summa…
Our sincere thanks go to our intrepid attorneys Bernie Rhodes and Taryn Nash at Lathrop Gage in Missouri, for shepherding this case through four and half years of hard and careful work.
And thank you to all of you, for your continued support for our open records work! We’re going to keep doing this kind of work, state by state and city by city, until all genealogical and historical public records go online for free public use, as they should be!
Reclaim The Records is an IRS-recognized 501(c)3 non-profit organization. Our EIN is 81-4985446. Contact us at [email protected]
Support us through Amazon Smile
