Reclaim The Records Year in Review 2025

Happy New Year from Reclaim the Records! We’ve had a busy year over here fighting the government from every possible angle.

In New York we WON and freely published the New York State death index for 1880-2017, we helped to defeat a detrimental state vital records proposal that the state Department of Health had snuck into the budget, and we even supported new state legislation, our first time working in the statehouse instead of just the courthouse. In Pennsylvania, we continued our never-ending litigation, working to ensure that millions of digital public records (including birth and death certificates) can be returned to free public use, instead of existing solely behind a multi-billion dollar monopoly’s expensive paywall. In Connecticut, a new lawsuit was launched…against one of our directors…after we won from the state the first-ever release of the state birth index through 2020. We’re also steeling ourselves for a big new legal fight with the VA, after it stopped providing valuable veterans records this past summer. We continued to reap the benefits of our previous successful lawsuit in Missouri, and updated our Missouri birth and death index websites with the latest annual data releases. And we collected never-before-public records from multiple states (without the need for lawsuits!) that will be released throughout the next few months, including particularly in Massachusetts!

So here’s a quick recap of our 2025, and a brief look towards 2026.

New York

Starting off 2025, we successfully helped to strike a provision that was shoehorned into the annual New York State budget by the Department of Health (DOH) that would have essentially ended access to vital records within New York State (outside of New York City). The half-baked proposal was barely coherent, but would have prevented even close relatives from accessing the majority of their family’s records, even in uncertified form, for upwards of 100 years! We launched a new website with information about this terrible budget clause NYSVitalRecords.org and with our legislative counsel, we teamed up with other genealogical organizations around the country to rally thousands of genealogists to oppose this, and one of our organization’s leaders actually testified in Albany to the New York State Senate, about why this was an absolutely awful thing to do. Luckily, the new York State Legislature agreed with us, and the DOH’s secretive attempt to close off these millions of state records was struck down before it could do damage to our records access.

Once this abomination was removed from the budget, we went on the offensive. For the first time ever, we worked closely with a State Senator, James Skoufis, who sponsored new legislation to actually expand access to vital records! This legislation would have required the Department of Health (DOH) to form a partnership with a genealogy company or organization to freely publish the historic vital records online and codify access to them into statute. Again, we worked with organizations from all around the country to express support for this bill, and it sailed through both houses of the New York State Legislature in June, passing both chambers nearly unanimously. Although the Governor vetoed the bill in October, she directed the DOH to work on a plan to publish the older records, so we hope that these records may yet go online. We’re working with our contacts in the statehouse to make sure we have a seat at that table, when the discussions happen — we intend to be in the room where it happens. In 2026, we will cooperate with our allies in the Legislature to possibly contribute language to new genealogy-related bills — stay tuned!

Meanwhile, while all this was going on, we entered the fourth year of a separate New York matter: we won a huge Freedom of Information lawsuit against the New York State Department of Health (the very same) at the State’s highest court, the Court of Appeals, which ordered the DOH to produce the entire New York State Death Index for 1880 through 2017. We built and launched a brand-new website, NewYorkDeathIndex.com, which has information on over ten and half million deaths, many of them never before available anywhere else! It combines the older pre-1956 death index information which we facilitated getting back in 2017.  For the first time ever, it’s possible to search nearly every New York State death dating back to when vital records first began in 1881.

Although we are incredibly grateful for what we have, there is more yet to come. The Court of Appeals has remanded our successful case back down to the trial court, where we (and the DOH) still have to hash out if some or all of the other data fields the DOH maintains are also public or not. We have already received incredibly important data such as name, age, date and place of death, and place of residence, but their databases contain much more information, especially for some of the modern deaths, such as parents’ names and exact date of birth information. In fact, the original trial court ruling ordered the Department to give us everything they maintained less social security numbers. We will have additional updates on this likely additional data in 2026, and if we do indeed receive it, we’ll publish it right away — stay tuned!

Pennsylvania

We haven’t talked much publicly about an ongoing Right-To-Know Law case in Pennsylvania about crucial genealogical materials, but behind the scenes, things have been boiling on the stove all year. In Pennsylvania, our board member and professional genealogist Alec Ferretti had requested copies of some already-digitized materials from the Pennsylvania State Archives, which is part of the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission (PMHC), under their state Right-To-Know Law (RTKL). Millions of these records–including birth certificates, death certificates, enslaved people’s records and their manumissions, William Penn’s land records, and more–had been digitized and transcribed over many years by the commercial genealogy company Ancestry.com, under contracts with the PMHC.

But Alec’s request for copies of these digital files was denied by PHMC, so he took the agency and his RTKL request to the state ombudsman program, the Office of Open Records (OOR). And the OOR ruled in his favor twice, stating that yes, these records really were subject to the state open records law, and needed to be turned over to him within thirty days. Public records, some of them hundreds of years old, could not be claimed as “proprietary information” by a commercial genealogy company!

Well, both the state agency and the giant commercial genealogy company really, really did not like those two OOR rulings. So they’re both working together and currently suing Alec to prevent the handover of the records to the public! And thus, much of the past year has had litigation over these public records, and probably most of 2026, too. After nearly two years of delays, the legal briefs have finally been filed in the Historical and Museum Commission’s (PHMC) litigation against Alec for copies of all of the records that were scanned pursuant to the contracts with Ancestry. You can read the key filings and background on how this case started is available in a 2023 news article. And there will be a whole lot of news coverage about this case, coming soon…

In 2026, we will be working to get these crucial state public records released back to the public. We just got news that the case has been granted an “en banc” hearing before a seven judge panel in Philadelphia in early February 2026 — stay tuned!

Connecticut

Getting sued by a government once wasn’t enough, so luckily in 2025 it happened twice! Back in 2021, our very same director was fighting with the Connecticut Department of Public Health, asking for copies of all their birth indexes. We had received an export back in 2018 and we freely published all our data at ConnecticutGenealogy.org, but we had only asked for the ones that were more than 100 years old, to coincide with the statutory embargo for birth certificates themselves.

However, the law does not actually have that same restriction for the indexes, so this time around, we asked for everything. The DPH did not respond to Alec for a year, so he rather than having an argument over the merit of the request, he had to file a complaint with the state’s independent FOI Commission. There was a lot of paperwork involved, and even a hearing with sworn testimony (we even did this part pro se!), but it wasn’t until summer 2025 that the FOI Commission ruled in his favor. (The delays were due to a quirk in the covid-related executive orders that were in effect when this case began).

Regardless, the state FOI Commission ordered the DPH to produce to us all Connecticut birth indexes through 2020! And they did not entertain any of the agency’s typical the-sky-is-falling arguments about why they did not have to give public records to the public. But of course, nothing is ever easy, and the agency appealed this determination to the State Superior Court, which means poor Alec got sued by a State…again. He was lucky enough to be served (via email) while hiking Machu Picchu!

So we have now had to retain local counsel in Connecticut to fight this case in court, and hopefully, the courts will continue to consider public records to be public records. But for now, we have to keep waiting for these precious indexes. If you’d like to stay up to speed on everything that’s happened so far, you can read the key filings and a recent news article.

The US Department of Veterans Affairs (the VA)

As any loyal reader of our newsletters would know, last Christmas, we launched a database at BIRLS.org, to search BIRLS, the Department of Veterans Affairs database of claims files that we previously won in a lawsuit. This finding aid contains nearly 20 million names, most of which lead to lengthy files sitting at the VA (and occasionally at NARA). These are akin to the famous Civil War Pension Files, but instead apply mostly to 20th century veterans, whose actual service records often burned in the infamous 1973 fire in St Louis. These surrogate files are often hundreds of pages long and represent possibly the most important source of information about those who served in WWI and WWII.

Our website launched with a built-in tool to directly submit FOIA requests for these files, and boy did genealogists love them! The genealogy community, historians, and others submitted over 20,000 FOIA requests to the VA over the last year using our free website and its free FOIA-filing tools, which brought a commensurate amount of attention.

But in a bit of terrible timing, the VA saw its staff unexpectedly reduced in the spring due to the actions of a certain car salesman, and by the summer the agency suddenly decided to no longer provide these files to genealogists, without any notice or public comment period. This feat was achieved by the not-yet-fired VA staff suddenly reinterpreting the agency’s 80 year old rules. Instead of providing deceased peoples’ files upon request…now they basically just don’t.

In order to pay lip service to their regulations that require providing information for genealogy, they instead provide a one page extract of the veteran’s basic biographical data. We suspect this is done through automated means, and poorly at that. The information is rarely more than what was supplied by the requester, even though the agency purports that they have inspected the file and provided everything that they can. FOIA should never result in the creation of new records at all; it’s supposed to provide only for the release of existing records, but here we are.

Along with our legal counsel, we are exploring how to fight this, but we fear that it’s going to be a long and complicated road. More specific details are available at BIRLS.org/updates. Stay tuned for updates throughout 2026 as we work to get these incredibly important military records back into the hands of the public, and out of the VA warehouses where they’re still languishing on the shelves.

In 2026

Coming to your inbox soon: more free historical records, from multiple jurisdictions, including a giant document dump from Massachusetts! See you in the new year. 😁

Too many government agencies and archives have long treated genealogists as if we were asking them for a favor when we ask to see their records — our records — rather than recognizing their responsibilities to the public under the law.

Reclaim The Records is changing that. If you like what we’re doing, if you want to see more records returned to the public domain, and if you want to see this approach brought to more record sets in more states, we hope you’ll consider making a contribution to our work.