Reclaim The Records, a non-profit organization dedicated to government transparency and public access to historical records, proudly announces the court-ordered release of information from millions of New York State death records, spanning three centuries of New York’s vibrant history. Last week, after a four-year legal battle, New York State’s highest court, the Court of Appeals, ruled in favor of Reclaim the Records in the case Matter of Reclaim the Records v. New York State Department of Health, finding that the Department of Health must disclose comprehensive death index records that had been requested under the state’s Freedom of Information Law (FOIL).

This decision mandates the release of detailed information about more than ten million deceased New Yorkers, including their names, dates of death, residences at death, ages at death, and associated state file numbers, for all years spanning from the start of state-mandated records collection in 1880 through the end of the year 2017, extending far beyond the limited online database for state deaths from 1957 to 1972. The court has also suggested that many more fields of data than just the ones previously available for the limited timeframe may also be disclosed under FOIL, and has ordered the state to provide its records for an in-camera review to determine which additional fields of data may be released under FOIL, with the presumption clearly being stated as the public’s right of access to most of the information.

Brooke Schreier Ganz, founder and president of Reclaim the Records, stated:

Reclaim The Records began our work ten years ago right here in New York, using Freedom of Information laws as a direct reaction to the state’s unusually restrictive access to government-held historical and genealogical materials. All of New York’s neighboring states, and many others across the country, have made this same kind of vital records index information freely available to the public over the years, and finally those of us who live in the state or who have deep roots in the state will get to enjoy the same kind of access for our own families and research projects. With this lawsuit win, historians, genealogists, journalists, and teachers will be able to freely access state information about the millions of people who lived in, and died in, the Empire State.

She continued:

Beyond the particular records being released in this case, we are also gratified to have the Court of Appeals uphold so many important parts of New York’s Freedom of Information Law, and to reiterate the right of public access to government-held materials, even in the face of agencies who attempted to keep them secret without legal justification. Public records belong to the public, and we are thrilled to know this case will help many other people and organizations use the state FOIL to reclaim their own records, for many years to come.

Ganz added that the non-profit intends to publish this historical and modern death index data for free public use, in searchable, downloadable, and reusable file formats, as they have done after similar lawsuit wins in other states and jurisdictions.

Alec Ferretti, Professional Genealogist and Reclaim the Records Director explains:

The Court has affirmed the public’s right to its own history. Millions of deceased New Yorkers’ basic biographical information, previously entombed in a decommissioned Albany bomb shelter, will finally become accessible to all. Reclaiming the New York State Death Index will put New York in line with all its neighboring states, help clear the Department of Health’s research backlog, deter fraud, and pave the way for legislation that opens up even more historic records.

Alex Calzareth, Professional Genealogist and Reclaim the Records Director continues:

New Yorkers and their families will now have much easier access to their history. The New York State death index will help family historians and journalists among others to recover stories that have faded over time. This decision is a win for transparency and puts an authoritative and comprehensive source of government information in the public’s hands.

Michael Moritz, the organization’s attorney on the case, added:

After four years of representing RTR in this matter, from the initial inception of the FOIL request through the administrative process and up to the highest court in the state, I’m ecstatic by the result handed down by the Court of Appeals. This is a great day for RTR and all freedom of information law enthusiasts. I’m very happy that people near and far will be able to benefit from the broader access to New York death index data secured by this case.

The case originated in 2021 when Reclaim the Records filed a FOIL request seeking the full New York State death index through 2017. After the Department of Health denied the request, the organization pursued legal action, culminating in this ruling. This decision not only facilitates greater access to vital records for research and personal purposes but tells agencies in New York State that they need to produce evidence of a harm if they are going to withhold records. Reclaim The Records remains committed to uncovering and releasing public records that have been improperly withheld, ensuring that history remains accessible to all.

Reclaim The Records is a nonprofit organization comprised of genealogists, historians, researchers, and open government advocates. The organization identifies important genealogical record sets that are unjustly restricted by government agencies and works to make them publicly accessible through FOIL requests and, when necessary, litigation.

And now for the nitty-gritty details

Back in 2021, we submitted a Freedom of Information Law (FOIL) request to the New York State Department of Health (NYS DOH), asking them for copies of nearly all of the state’s extant death index records, covering all years from the start of state-mandated records collection in 1880 through the end of the year 2017. After asking the DOH politely, we were told no – twice.

So we sued them, because obviously. And after nearly four years of work, three rounds of brief-writing and expert affidavits, two appeals to two different courts, and plenty of bureaucratic foot‑dragging, we finally heard the good news. In May 2025, New York’s highest court, the Court of Appeals, finally said the magic words we’d been waiting for:

Hand. Over. The. Files. To. The. Public.

You guys…? We won. We won big.

New York is finally going to have a full state death index available for the public, for free, like all of its neighboring states and many others around the country. Everyone from journalists to teachers to historians to — yeah yeah — genealogists is going to get to use it, finally!

The New York State Court of Appeals has ruled that even though certified copies of state death certificates may have long embargo periods and tough criteria for potentially-entitled parties to request them, the death index data fields that were extracted from those certificates, with some very limited exceptions, are not exempt from disclosure under the state Freedom of Information law. The data is largely not “too private” to be released to the public, nor to go online. The data’s release will also not enable identity theft and fraud against dead people (um, how would that even work…?), despite the state’s unsupported claims to the contrary throughout our lawsuit. And in fact, the Court explicitly agreed that the public release of this death index data would help deter fraud, and provide for many other legitimate uses that are clearly in the public interest.

The case was a slam dunk win, not just for genealogy and historical data, but also for the New York State Freedom of Information Law itself — and we couldn’t be happier.

So what are we getting?

We’re getting the state death index from 1880-2017, which is probably at least ten million records. It’s an index with many more years than had ever been publicly available before, but also an index that will finally be wholly free and reusable instead of partially paywalled, and also an index where some years will have many new types and fields of data made available to the public.

This decision affirms our rights under FOIL to information about deceased New Yorkers, including their names, dates of death, residences at death, ages at death, gender, and associated state file numbers. We’ll call that stuff the “basic data” for brevity’s sake.

But there will likely be more! The court has also ruled that many more fields of data may be disclosed under FOIL. After all, we know that a death certificate usually has much more information, including often the actual birth date or year (not just age at death), birthplace, parents’ names, parents’ birthplaces, spouse’s name, veteran status, and possibly many more data fields, especially for more recent years. We’ll call all this good stuff the “extra data”, to keep it simple.

So we’re probably getting some “extra data” too. But which fields? Well, one problem is that not once in this whole four year process has the DOH ever stated exactly what data fields even exist for which years of the index. They tried to crudely withhold everything, rather than making a field-by-field case-by-case argument for data release or limited redaction, which is what the law actually requires. So the Court of Appeals has, as part of our win, ordered the DOH to now finally provide its actual index records to a lower level court for what’s called an “in-camera review” in front of a judge. That judge will hear arguments about what parts of this “extra data” might be released — but with a clearly-stated reminder from the Court of Appeals that the presumption must be the public’s right of access to most of the information.

So yeah, we’re getting 137 years of data, and possibly many more data fields than have ever been released before, although we don’t yet know exactly which extra ones and for which years. Importantly for New York, one of those “extra fields” that will almost certainly be released to us for the first time is the actual location of death, as distinct from the already-released residence code of the deceased. This is big, because New York allows the public to request a death certificate from the town or county clerk of the location of death, if that information is known, rather than having to deal with a four-year backlog when requesting from the state DOH in Albany.

– Part 1: the 1880-1956 index

Some of our long-time supporters might remember that way back in 2016-2017, when we were a little baby organization (and not even a real 501(c)3 yet), we spent seventeen months of legal work using FOIL and fighting with the DOH (though not in a formal lawsuit) to get the first-ever public copies online of the New York State birth, marriage, and death indices. We only asked for death indexes up through 1956 in that earlier project, because those records had been already made public at the time, but only on very old and scratched-up microfiche sheets held at various New York State libraries. Still, we figured that digitizing those microfiche sheets was better than having nothing online at all — which was the shameful status quo in New York prior to our 2017 work.

And in the course of that project, the DOH also showed us a hint of exactly what kind of agency they are. In response to our public records request for this public data, the DOH actually gave us an official $152,000 cost estimate, presumably in the hopes that we would then give up on our quest for open public records, and just go away. (As the state of Missouri would later learn in spectacular fashion, this strategy really doesn’t work with us.)

But then one very large genealogy company, who had heard through the grapevine that we were trying to get this index data from the state, “jumped the line” to get early access to the same data. They used the word-for-word text of our own about-to-be-successful FOIL request to get “their” later FOIL request fulfilled by the DOH before ours, then scanned the data presumably without any inflated $152,000 estimate, then publicly claimed they were the ones who enabled this first-ever state index release. (Ick.)

Still, this competition did eventually lead to the publication of this 1880-1956 state index data, which was good. And we didn’t end up having to pay anything to the DOH for it after all. So we’ve had the image copies made from the scanned microfiche sheets online for free public use ever since that early win. But we also had developed a bit of a grudge, after all the shenanigans.

Well, funny story. That same company transcribed the data and gave a copy to the state, so that the DOH would finally have their own internal version to search through, too. That way the state workers wouldn’t have to keep using the scratched-up microfiche sheets internally either, because no one really likes doing that. Thus these transcriptions were also responsive materials to our 2021 FOIL request.

Good news! These files are already in our possession, because the DOH released them to us without a fight. And so we can release the 1880-1956 portion of the state death index to the public — for free.

– Part 2: the 1957-1972 index

Okay, so these years of the New York State death index are already online on the DOH’s own Open Data platform, and have been since before we even started the fight for the earlier indexes. This database has existed for at least a decade, and the DOH would traditionally update the information quarterly. At least, the updates used to be quarterly, but for the past two years, they’ve been stalled out, with the online public data now ending at the end of 1972. The DOH sent us these data files back in 2022, but they were always downloadable from the portal, and are available on many commercial sites. Frustratingly, the database does not include the location of death (while the older microfilmed death indexes have many fewer fields, but do have place of death).    

The court affirmed that these indexes are subject to FOIL. In fact, the existence of these public indexes underpinned the Courts’ entire holding that these fields of “basic data” both constitute an index, and are disclosable in their entirety for all years. Additionally, because the Court of Appeals has ordered an “in-camera review” of all the post-1956 index files, these “basic data” years will almost certainly be supplemented by some of the “extra data” fields too, unless the DOH can come up with a legally-convincing argument why each and every specific extra field should be withheld, with specific legal exemptions cited under state law rather than baseless claims about fraud, which *snort-laugh*.

While we believe that our case to get at least the place of death field for the 1957-1972 index is incredibly strong under the Court’s ruling, we have another confession. We already have the place of death code for those years. As part of an unrelated FOIL request, undertaken by a genealogist who was not officially working in an RTR capacity, the DOH actually relented on appeal, and provided him with the location of death codes. RTR shall make these available to the public very soon. (We had hoped to do this earlier in the year, but we got bogged down trying to kill off problematic legislative proposals surrounding NYS Vital records and subsequently helping to draft new ones!) 

– Part 3: the post-1972 index

We’re also getting this data, all the way through December 31, 2017, and it will be public for the first time ever. (That feels so good to type!)

At a minimum, it will consist of the “basic data” fields, and we’re very likely to be entitled to the same “extra data” fields that we will get for the earlier records. The Court of Appeals explicitly said that the fifty year regulatory cut-off that the DOH has been using as a threshold actually had no relevance to our FOIL request. That fifty years limit applies to genealogical requests for death certificates in New York, but indexes aren’t certificates! We do hope that some of these more modern indexes will have fields that don’t exist on the older records, and that we’d be able to get those as well!

Anyway, yeah, we’re getting through 2017, and the Court agreed that basic biographical information about who died is a matter of public record. So hypothetically, it sure seems like someone can turn around and ask for all the data through 2024, if not later…

Wait, what about New York City?

Oh we are so excited you asked! As many of you know, New York State and New York City are entirely separate vital records jurisdictions, like if NYC were a whole separate state. It’s weird and annoying like that. And this Court of Appeals ruling was about a FOIL request for the State DOH’s index, not the City’s index…

But. But! Both the State and the City are still subject to the same state Freedom of Information law! Court of Appeals rulings should overrule agencies’ regulations about access to death data, even quasi-autonomous agencies’ regulations. This ruling didn’t explicitly talk about the City or its records, but the City and its records will be bound by the Decision anyway! At least, if someone asks them for their index…

Which we absolutely will. Stay tuned for the fun!

However, that doesn’t mean that New York City isn’t represented at all in the data we already won. If we want to be pedantic (and we do), Staten Island, Queens, and the Bronx didn’t become part of New York City until 1898.  Before that, those three counties reported their vital events to Albany, so anyone who died there from 1880-1898 would be included in these indexes. While these indexes are essentially identical to the scanned images we published in 2017, this FOIL matter represents the first time that this death information will been posted online, for free, in a searchable database like this!

Where we go from here

We’re not sure how long it will take to get the data from the DOH, or if we will get the initial fields of information before we hash out the status of the others. What we can say for sure is that as soon as we get it, we’ll clean the data, build search tools, and as always, publish every last line in free, downloadable, reusable formats. Then we’ll turn to the next locked archive, and do this again!

In September 2017, Reclaim The Records made a new FOIL request of the New York State Department of Health (NYS DOH), asking for the first-ever public copy of the basic index to all births in New York State (minus New York City). In September 2018, after a year of working and waiting and e-mailing and finally receiving the records, we went public with the news that we had won, and published the records online.

Here’s how we did it.

This is the text of the original request we sent, via its page on MuckRock.com:

To Whom It May Concern:

My name is Brooke Schreier Ganz, and I am the president and founder of a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization called Reclaim The Records. We use Freedom of Information laws to obtain copies of important genealogical record sets, which we then publish online for free public use, returning the records to the public domain. Pursuant to the New York State Freedom of Information Law (1977 N.Y. Laws ch. 933), I hereby request the following records on behalf of our organization:

I would like to receive a copy of the New York State birth index, from 1880 (or as early as such records are available) through December 31, 1942, inclusive. This request is for the basic index or “finding aid” only; please note that I am not requesting any actual birth certificates.

The New York State Department of Health has already compiled and made available to the public some of the years of this statewide birth index. For several decades now, the earlier years of this birth index, through approximately 1936, have been available for free public use at a number of New York public libraries. The index through approximately 1942 is supposedly available at the Manhattan branch of the National Archives (NARA). We have also heard that your office has recently told other FOIL requestors of the birth index’s public availability through 1942. However, no matter the date range, this index seems to only be available in an old-fashioned microfiche format, with its public availability limited as to locations and operating hours, as well as the deteriorating quality of the microfiche sheets.

While the New York State Department of Education does control the libraries where this index is available, the state vital records microfiche there are still the property of the Department of Health, and are merely on long-term loan to those libraries. Therefore this FOIL request is directed to you at the Department of Health, and not to them.

At some point in the past there was evidently a real statewide birth index database, and it was clearly printed out on paper copies which were then photographed and turned into the state birth index microfiche sheets. Therefore, I would prefer to receive these records in a raw database format, preferably in SQL or CSV format on a USB hard drive, wherever possible. However, if that state birth database is no longer available — and if not, why not? what happened to it? — then I will settle for accepting these records as high quality digital scans of the microfiche sheets, although I recognize they may be damaged or degraded. I am willing to pay the costs associated with the records production, along with the costs of the USB hard drive and any insured shipping costs to California, if needed. Please inform me of any potential charges in advance of fulfilling my request.

This request is not being made for commercial purposes. The requested records will be scanned and uploaded to the Internet, and will be made freely available to the general public. It is anticipated that some non-profit genealogical groups may choose to transcribe the information in the birth index, to turn it into a new text-searchable database. We would be happy to share any such database with the Department of Health.

Please also be advised that this FOIL request is being filed publicly through the website MuckRock.com, and all correspondence about this request will be immediately published to the general public.

Thank you in advance for your anticipated cooperation in this matter. I look forward to receiving your response to this request within five business days, as the statute requires.

This statewide birth index was previously only available to researchers who were sitting in a small number of upstate New York public libraries, as well as the Manhattan branch of the National Archives (NARA). And even then, it was only available in an old-fashioned and difficult format, scratched-up and faded microfiche sheets. And you had to hand in your driver’s license to be held hostage by the librarian just so you could see a single sheet at a time. So yeah, they were technically public records, but in practice they were not public public records.

Well now, thanks to our work, we can all research people in the New York State birth index whenever we want, from our own homes, for free. You can browse the images, download the images, re-post them to your own website, and even transcribe everything into your own database, if you want. And we’re pretty sure that at least two or three major genealogy websites will be working on indexing projects to make this data truly text-searchable in the next year or so. But for now, it’s image-only.

What’s in the index? And what’s not in the index?

This birth index is sorted by year, and then alphabetically by surname within each year. The town of birth is listed, although sometimes shown as an abbreviation, as is the certificate number.

There are handwritten additions on many of the sheets, sometimes even notating the date of death. And several of the years have a supplemental section at the very end of the year, so if you can’t find someone try skipping to the end of the year to check there, too. We’ve also identified a few missing images here and there, including at least sixty-six missing microfiche sheets from the beginning of the alphabet for the year 1905, and we’re in contact with the New York State Department of Health to have them provide re-scans where needed.

Note that this index does not contain lists of births from New York City. New York City is considered to be an entirely separate vital records jurisdiction from the rest of New York state, and consequently the city has its own birth, marriage, and death indices. However, a small number of NYC birth listings are found scattered throughout this index, either because the births happened in towns that were previously independent before the consolidation of the city in 1898 (for example, a pre-1898 birth in a place like Canarsie [Brooklyn] or Flushing [Queens] might be listed here) or because there was a late birth registration.

(We should probably mention that we at Reclaim The Records will be fighting for the first free public copy of the New York City birth index later this year, in a legal case that we’ve been planning for over two years. We’re pretty psyched. But more on that later this year.)

Also note that births that took place in the cities of Albany, Buffalo, and Yonkers are not included until about 1914 or 1915; those three cities did not initially participate in the statewide registration of births and kept their own records.

Those old microfiche copies of the birth index at the libraries generally did not go past 1938, but we’ve been able to obtain and publish the data here up through 1942. Later years of the birth index may become publicly available after seventy-five years, so each January we’ll make new FOIL requests for each newly-available year of data.

Oh, and a shout-out to all the “search angels” and people doing adoption research: you guys will be pleased to know that at least some (but not all) original birth names for New York adoptees are listed in this index. The state apparently got lazy and re-used the same certificate number on both the original birth certificates and the amended certificates, which tie together the old name and the new name. So hypothetically, if you wanted to read through page after page within a given year searching for a matching certificate number to find both names…well, that’s a thing you could do now, although it might take a few hours. Hypothetically. ?

(This might be a good time to mention that Reclaim The Records is a strategic partner organization of the New York Adoptee Rights Coalition. We’re one of the only genealogist or historian organizations in the country to publicly come out in support of the rights of adult adoptees, or the descendants of deceased adoptees, to reclaim their original and unaltered birth certificates from the state, without pre-conditions or redactions.)

Okay, I found a name, now what?

This record set is only the index to New York State birth records. If you find a name of a relative or other person of interest in this index, you can then place an order for a copy of the original birth certificate, which will have much more information on it, such as the person’s place of birth and the names of the person’s parents. In New York State (although not New York City), a birth certificate of a person who is known to be deceased and which is more than 75 years old is considered to be open and available to the public.

You can order a copy of a birth certificate directly from the NYS DOH in Albany. Alternately, you can also try ordering a copy from the exact city clerk or town clerk where the birth took place. This may be a lot faster than dealing with Albany, but some towns might only provide a typed extract of the information on the certificate, instead of a photocopy version.

Your best bet is to try calling the town clerk first and see if they can help you. Otherwise, send the request to Albany, but be prepared to wait up to eight months.

So, who really freed these records?

Okay, so let’s talk about the elephant in the room. A few of you might have noticed that commercial genealogy behemoth Ancestry.com also put these new New York State birth index files on their website a few weeks ago. However, their image copies of these public records are, as usual, hidden behind their very expensive paywall. In comparison, all data that we at Reclaim The Records ever win or acquire is always published for free, explicitly in the public domain, and is even downloadable.

As a rule, Ancestry refuses to give any credit for records sets that Reclaim The Records has targeted, acquired, and published over the past few years, even though we always share our data freely. So we think it’s only fair to give a little backstory here.

We believe Ancestry may have piggybacked on our 2017 FOIL request for these New York State birth index files, thereby getting “first dibs” access to the records (both the original microfiche sheets and the newly-digitized image files) before we did and before the general public. We know for a fact that this is what Ancestry did for an earlier record set from this same government agency, the New York State death index from the NYS DOH. For that set, we received copies of documents from the DOH showing that employees at Ancestry actually cut-and-pasted our own words from our FOIL request, and used our words for Ancestry’s subsequent FOIL request, and then even had the state fulfill their request more than a year before ours, and without the same kind of restrictions the state had attempted to put on us, such as the cost of the records, the “exploding offer” timeframe for providing payment, the sign-off from a state archivist, the condition of the microfiche scanning machine (!), and more.

That whole sketchy situation is the subject of an ongoing lawsuit of ours in the Supreme Court of New York, Albany County, and you can read more about it in one of our previous newsletters. Should we win that lawsuit, we look forward to bringing to the public and the press any documentation we find about the state’s financial dealings with Ancestry, which members of the press have described as a sweetheart deal.

So, yeah, they did get these records online first. But we got them online and free first, we very likely filed the original FOIL request first, and we didn’t have to lift anybody’s words or make a backroom deal with the state to do any of it. ?

Thank you

Thank you to our awesome New York FOIL attorney David Rankin of the firm Beldock, Levine, and Hoffman for helping us win public access to these records. Dave and his team are actually helping us with four different Freedom of Information lawsuits at the moment, two of which will be launching in the next month — including our first-ever FOIA lawsuit against a federal agency. So exciting!

What’s Next?

You might be wondering: gee, those Reclaim The Records folks have now put the New York State birth index online and they recently got the New York State death index online, too. Hmmm. What about the New York State marriage index?

Well, you’re very perceptive. Stay tuned. ?

On January 4, 2016, Reclaim The Records submitted a New York State Freedom of Information Law (FOIL) request to the New York State Department of Health for a copy of the entire New York State death index, from June 1880 through December 31, 1956. We requested the index only in this FOIL request.

And seventeen months later, we won the records! And this is the story of how we did it.

This death index covers 1880-1956, which is seventy-seven years! Here are some things to keep in mind:

1. 1880 and 1881 have very limited data, as the state law requiring reporting deaths to the state didn’t have great compliance at first.
2. 1943 is, unfortunately, extremely hard to read, and we don’t know if any better copy exists. If there is, we’ll go after it with a new FOIL request and scan it.
3. New York City deaths are, for the most part, not included in this statewide death index. That’s because New York City and New York State are completely different vital records jurisdictions. However, some deaths that were in neighborhoods that are part of modern-day New York City — such as Flushing (Queens) or Canarsie (Brooklyn) — do show up in the pre-1897/1898 statewide death index! That’s because they weren’t incorporated as part of the city yet at the time they were recorded.
4. Three major cities are not included in this statewide death index until 1914 or 1915: Yonkers, Buffalo, and Albany. Reclaim The Records has made three new and separate FOIL requests to those city clerks for the first-ever public copies of their 1880-1914 death indices, in order to complete the missing data.

We uploaded all these files, year by year, to the Internet Archive (archive.org). Other websites, as well as individual researchers, are welcome to use, download, and even host the files on their own websites, and create transcription projects if they wish. The files are entirely in the public domain, free to use without any restrictions. If you do create a transcription, though, we’d appreciate just having our name mentioned, and a link back to our website (https://www.ReclaimTheRecords.org/).

Each year’s worth of files can be very large, perhaps a 10 GB zip file for images for an earlier year, or 20 GB for later years, as the later years do have more names and therefore more images in them. We would recommend browsing through the data using the images hosted online on the Internet Archive’s website, rather than trying to download the huge zip files to your computer on a slow home modem connection, but that’s up to you.

Here’s what the sample URL structure looks like:

https://archive.org/details/New_York_State_Death_Index_1880
https://archive.org/details/New_York_State_Death_Index_1881
https://archive.org/details/New_York_State_Death_Index_1882
https://archive.org/details/New_York_State_Death_Index_1883
https://archive.org/details/New_York_State_Death_Index_1884
https://archive.org/details/New_York_State_Death_Index_1885

…and so on. You get the idea, just change the year at the end of the URL to any year between 1880 and 1956.

The best way to see the WHOLE LIST of the items in the New York State Death Index collection is through this direct link:
https://archive.org/details/nydeathindex

The full text of our request is available below, and also available to follow on the MuckRock website:

To Whom It May Concern:

Pursuant to the New York State Freedom of Information Law (1977 N.Y. Laws ch. 933), I hereby request the following records:

I would like to receive a copy of the New York State death index, from June 1880 (or as early as such records are available) through December 31, 1956, inclusive. Please note that this request is for the basic index only, and not the actual death certificates.

The New York State Department of Health has already made this index freely available in microfiche format at various public libraries in upstate New York, as well as at the New York City branch of NARA, the National Archives and Records Administration. However, that microfiche is only accessible to researchers who are physically onsite at one of those locations.

The New York State Department of Health has also made a selection of data from the index for the years 1957-1965 available to the public in database format on the New York State open data portal, at this online address:
https://health.data.ny.gov/Health/Genealogical-Research-Death-Index-Beginning-1957/vafa-pf2s

That data is available for searches online and for download to a personal computer. The data is updated quarterly for the more recent years with a fifty year lag; e.g. the information from 1966 will start to be added to that file in 2016.

If the more modern data from 1957-1965 is already available to the public, then there doesn’t appear to be any reason that the older data from 1880-1956 could not be made available too, in whatever format it currently exists.

This request is not being made for commercial purposes. The requested documents will be scanned and uploaded to the Internet, and will be made freely available to the general public. It is anticipated that some non-profit genealogical groups may choose to transcribe the information in the death index, to turn it into a new text-searchable database. We would be happy to share any such database with the Department of Health.

If possible, I would prefer the request filled electronically, by e-mail attachment if available or via other media. Please be advised that if any microfiche or microfilm copies need to be made, these will also require shipping fees to California. Please inform me of any potential charges in advance of fulfilling my request.

Please also be advised that this FOIL request is being filed publicly through the website MuckRock.com, and all correspondence about this request will be immediately published to the general public.

Thank you in advance for your anticipated cooperation in this matter. I look forward to receiving your response to this request within 5 business days, as the statute requires.

And here’s the story about how we did it. It’s kind of long, but it’s really juicy, so if reading tales of government malfeasance is your thing, settle in for a treat.

Part I: We ask nicely

Back in January 2016, Reclaim The Records wrote and sent a simple Freedom of Information Law request to the New York State Department of Health (DOH). You can read the whole thing online if you want, because we publish all our requests and correspondence out in the open, usually through the website MuckRock, which helps people send and organize FOIA and state FOI requests.

We made two main points to the DOH in our request:

1. This 1880-1956 death index we’re asking for is already a public record, because you guys literally published for the public it years ago on microfiche and gave the copies to a few public libraries, plus the NARA branch in Manhattan. But microfiche is an old-fashioned format and hard to use, and the library copies are kind of scratched up. And a lot of genealogists with New York roots live somewhere else, and don’t want to have to travel across the country to do look-ups. Why can’t we just get a copy of that microfiche set scanned, so we can all do research at home, in our pajamas?
2. You guys at the DOH already transcribed and publish the 1957-1965 (now 1967) death index data on your own DOH open data portal, so what about the pre-1957 stuff? Why can’t genealogists get that? If all this mid-century data is okay with you, clearly not “too personal” or intrusive, then the very old data must be totally fine, right?

And so we sent off the request. And we waited to hear back.

Finally, on March 29, 2016, they gave us a response to our request. And what they had to say was shocking. Yes, the Department of Health conceded that we had the legal right to a copy of the statewide death index under the New York Freedom of Information Law. They could find no reason to legally deny our request.

So instead, they tried another way to dissuade us, by refusing to take the subsequent step in the state law, which was for the agency to estimate the actual costs of making those copies.

Part II: The state breaks the law…like, a lot

Rather than count up the actual number of microfiche sheets in question, or to provide a fair estimate for the costs of digitally scanning each of those sheets, the DOH simply decided that there would be a flat fee of $2,000 per year of microfiche copied, regardless of how many sheets were actually included in that year.

Since the microfiche set covered 1880-1956, which is seventy-six years, this meant that the DOH wanted us to pay them $152,000 for the New York State death index.

And they weren’t done yet! They also stated in this response that we had a maximum of ten business days to give them a yes or no answer to this “estimate”.

And we must then immediately provide them with a 50% downpayment, meaning $76,000. Otherwise, they said that they would close and cancel this FOIL request entirely.

(You can probably imagine what went through our head when we read their letter with these demands.)

(And you can read it for yourself, because we posted their letter to MuckRock.)

So we did what any good activist group would do, and called our attorneys at Rankin & Taylor, the same awesome bunch who had fought and won our right to the New York City marriage license index the year before.

Part III: Bring on the lawyers

Our attorneys confirmed for us that the state’s response was illegal in multiple ways. First of all, an agency that grants a FOIL request must tell you how approximately many records you’ve actually won. Here, New York was claiming that there was an unknown number of microfiche sheets per year but that the number was somehow exactly the same for each of the seventy-six years. This was absurd, as of course the number of deaths in the state varied from year to year, and grew over time as the population increased, and sometimes had unusual spikes in the death rate as happened in the 1918-1919 influenza pandemic. For the state to simply make a flat fee for each of the seventy-six years in question, even if that fee had been reasonable, was breaking the law all on its own.

But of course, that fee wasn’t reasonable, either. The cost of standard paper copies is capped in New York’s FOIL at twenty-five cents a page, but we were asking for microfiche sheets whose copying costs were not explicitly mentioned in the statue; the law just said that fees for copies of other types of non-paper records may be charged based upon the actual cost of reproduction. But the state did not provide any information on why it thought a year’s worth of microfiche scanning would cost $2,000. They did not provide any copies of estimates from vendors, nor the names of vendors, nor published price lists, nor did they ever provide some after we pressed them for details. They invented the $2,000 per year cost, and then never explained or apologized for it.

Thanks to a genealogist friend who happened to be in Albany and who took it upon herself to count up all the microfiche sheets of the death index at the library, we knew there were 1,522 microfiche sheets in total in the state death index, give or take the few sheets that had gone astray over the years.

Based on quotations from multiple digitization companies whose price lists we found online, we were able to establish that the actual costs of scanning each microfiche sheet would be about $2 per sheet, maybe a little less if we were doing a big bulk order. That meant that the actual cost of fulfilling this FOIL request should have been about $3,044 dollars for the full seventy-six years of microfiche scanning, plus a little more for the cost of shipping.

Even the National Archives (NARA), whose prices tend to be some of the highest amongst archives who directly create scans and copies for researchers, say they will prepare microfiche scans for researchers for $12 per sheet, although they also include free shipping. Even at that inflated cost, our death index project would have cost about $18,264 in total – expensive, yes, but still far, far less than Albany’s “estimate” of $152,000! (For the record, the current median price of a home in Albany is $166,200.)

Finally, our attorneys confirmed for us that the Department of Health’s demand that we provide them a 50% downpayment for their made-up $152,000 estimate within ten business days – a demand known as an “exploding offer” – was entirely illegal. There is no such requirement in New York State’s FOIL that a records request be agreed to in a specific timeframe, much less in one so short a window. The Department’s Records Access Officer had completely made it up. And they never apologized for it, even after they dropped that part of the demand when our attorney called them out on their behavior.

Our attorney also set up a phone conversation with the pro bono New York State Committee on Open Government, a watchdog group funded by the New York legislature, and their executive director confirmed for us that the Department of Health was breaking FOIL and acting in bad faith. Furthermore, the Department’s Records Access Officer had exceeded a reasonable or legal timeframe for even making this wholly ridiculous response. They had responded 143 days after our original request, and fifty-three days after we had repeatedly asked them to justify their outrageous fees; New York’s FOIL requires a full government response in fivebusiness days and provides for a twenty business day limit in unusual circumstances.

This kind of legal trickery, first a delay and then a refusal to provide a real estimate of the records’ reproduction costs, was insidious, because on the surface, the state could act innocent and claim that they hadn’t really blocked off our legal access to the records, it was just that we had been unable or unwilling to pay for them. It was essentially a non-denial denial, or a “constructive denial” as the legal terminology calls it – but getting a Department of Health watchdog to side with us instead of their own agency would be difficult. And that’s just what happened.

For reasons that defy explanation, when we filed a formal appeal of this FOIL request with the Department of Health on June 3, 2016, the person to whom we appealed, who also worked for the Department, proceeded to deny our appeal.

Part IV: FOIL request, take two

At that point, we had a choice to make. We could take the next step and take the case to trial, suing the state of New York. We would probably win, but it would be expensive, and there was no guarantee that we would win back attorneys fees even if we did win all the records. In New York, the awarding of attorneys fees is left up to the discretion of the judge, and is a separate question from whether the records were wrongly being withheld.

But we had another option. In all the months of fighting with the DOH for these records, our point person on the case had been their Records Access Officer, a woman whose name we will omit here but which can be easily determined from reading through our legal paperwork, which are all a matter of public record and all online. She had been the person behind the lack of transparency on pricing, the ten-day exploding offer, the months of delays, and all of that.

And as we were approaching the legal deadline of whether or not to pursue legal action against the state, we heard through the grapevine that this woman was suddenly no longer the Records Access Officer. We hadn’t yet had time to file a formal legal complaint against her and her office’s actions; perhaps she had gotten into trouble for unethical and illegal behavior with other records requestors? In any case, she was now gone.

This meant that instead of suing the state, we could try a different tactic. We could re-file a new FOIL request for the death index, starting from scratch, with the new Records Access Officer, hoping that this one would be more reasonable than her predecessor. And that’s just what we did. Luckily, this new one was far more pleasant to deal with, and as far as we could see she did not do anything overtly illegal.

Part V: Can we scan that for you?

At this point, it was nearing the end of 2016. In an effort to move things along, we asked the new Records Access Officer if we could bring in our own digitization vendor to do the scanning of the microfiche sheets they held, just to make it easier on the state and get these records copied already. After all, they’d already said on their own letterhead that we were legally entitled to a copy of the files; we were now basically just nitpicking over how much it would cost and who would pay for it.

She replied that we could indeed hire our own vendor to do the scanning…with a few minor restrictions. First of all, our vendor would have to come onsite to Albany, and could not remove the sheets from the state facility. Second, the vendor would only be allowed to do their work there during business hours on weekdays and when employees of the Department had free time to supervise them doing the work directly. Third, they could only do the microfiche scanning sheet by sheet, hand-fed into the machine instead of using the automatic feeder, a process that would take much longer, and therefore incur a higher cost. Fourth, we had to provide a full spec list and product manual of the brand and exact model of the scanner that our vendor would use, in order to get the approval from the state. And so on.

Frustrated but persistent, we said yes to all these demands. Yes, we’ll agree to your picky timetable; yes, we’ll get you all the details on our magic microfiche scanner. But can we just have the death index already? Please?

Part VI: New York hires an archivist

Well, no. Because the next hoop the state wanted us to jump through was this: we were told that we now had to wait a few more months while the state hired an archivist to come to Albany and assess the quality of the microfiche copies of the death index they held in their state vaults, to see if they were too fragile to scan with this magic microfiche machine. And that meant that we also had to wait while they discussed and approved the government funding to hire this archivist.

So while we waited, we tried yet another tack to speed up this request, which was by now more than a year old. Hey, remember how there are about eleven libraries in New York State where the public can use a copy of this microfiche? Sure, those copies of the microfiche are in much worse physical shape than the ones in the Department’s vaults, but they’re available right now. Can we maybe scan one of those copies instead of waiting for you guys in Albany to get an archivist to assess your copies? Wouldn’t that be faster and easier?

Part VII: Nope, not ours

And here’s one of the nuttiest things that happened in this whole story: the New York State Department of Health then repeatedly denied to us that these copies of their own microfiche, which are in libraries across the state through a strict legal arrangement between the Department and those libraries, ever belonged to them in the first place. They claimed that the libraries are under the Department of Education, and to get access to their holdings, including these death index microfiche, we would have to file a FOIL request with the Department of Education instead of the Department of Health.

In other words, we were the ones who had to inform the Department of Health about their own property, their own microfiche copies of the statewide death index, being available throughout the state. And even when we did, they repeatedly denied to us in print and by phone that these microfiche in their libraries are their property. So we decided not to pursue the idea of duplicating the libraries’ copies of the fiche, and to wait out the arrival of the new archivist to confirm that the state’s own copies were in acceptable condition.

Part VIII: Free at last?

And then? Another bombshell dropped – but this time, a good one, or so it seemed, The Records Access Officer, on one of our many phone calls to her asking for a status update, suddenly let us know that the Department would be hiring a vendor to scan the vault copies. And the state would not charge us anything for the vendor’s labor. They didn’t even give us an estimated cost at all.

This was wonderful news, but also quite odd – hadn’t we just been spending months with the previous Records Access Officer fighting over the cost of the scanning? But now it was all going to be handed to us for free? We didn’t want to look a gift horse in the mouth, so we didn’t ask too many questions. And a few months later, seventeen months after the original FOIL request had been filed, we finally received in the mail a small USB hard drive containing all the seventy-six years of scanned microfiche. It was over, Reclaim The Records had the New York State death index.

Part IX: There’s no such thing as a free lunch

Several months later, we found out why Reclaim The Records had never received a bill, or even an estimate, from the state itself or from the mysterious vendor who had scanned the microfiche sheets on behalf on the state.

The vendor turned out to be none other than Ancestry.com, the world’s largest for-profit genealogy company. They, along with every other genealogy organization in the world, as well as those from many other industries like insurance companies, had been hammering on New York State for years, for decades, begging for copies of the incredibly valuable data of this statewide death index. But not one of these companies or organizations had ever cracked the wall…until Reclaim The Records showed up on the scene with our awesome new approach of using Freedom of Information laws to force the state’s hand.

And at that point, Ancestry apparently felt threatened and did not want to be cut out of the records pipeline entirely. Even though Reclaim The Records always has and always will post all our data online for free, whether images or text, clearly in the public domain, it seems like Ancestry wanted to make sure they still were a player in the game with unique access to the state. And so unbeknownst to us, they had gone to the state and said look, Reclaim The Records is gunning for you guys, they are clearly going to win their legal case against you, how about you let us at least scan the data for you for free?

On the one hand, this was a very generous thing for Ancestry to do, as it meant that our little non-profit organization didn’t have to bear the cost of thousands of dollars for scanning, which the state was certainly allowed to charge us under FOIL. But there was also an ulterior motive: by volunteering to be the vendor doing the actual scanning, Ancestry was guaranteeing that they had access to the raw images of the statewide death index before anyone else, even before the state itself. This meant that they had a head start on scanning and perhaps even indexing this brand new data and preparing it for upload to their website, while we at Reclaim The Records, the original FOIL requestor, waited ignorantly and patiently for our own copy to arrive in the mail.

It also meant that a few months later, when Ancestry had finally transcribed the entire New York State death index and revealed it on their website as a fait accompli, they put their copy of both the images and the new searchable database behind their paywall. That would have been fine with us, except for one little issue: they never once mentioned how they acquired that data in the first place. They presented it entirely as their own achievement.

Part X: Ancestry takes the credit

Ancestry never mentioned that Reclaim The Records had initiated the FOIL request, had fought the state and their underhanded tactics for over a year, had paid our own attorneys for for legal help. They never mentioned how Ancestry had worked a backroom deal with New York State to be the first-ever scanning operation of these files, all just to get a few months’ headway on this public data. And in their publication of the new database, including their press releases and blog posts and even a specially-made video introduction they filmed for social media, they never once mentioned a single word about Reclaim The Records, or our work, or gave a link to our website.

Ancestry will, however, make quite a bit of money off these millions of valuable New York records being posted behind their paywall, an especially important concern as news reports indicate that the company was until recently moving towards an IPO. Their estimated valuation in 2016 was $2.6 billion; Reclaim The Records’ actual valuation in 2016, at the time of our initial FOIL request, was literally zero dollars. We did it for the love of open public records access.

Was all this legal? Sure. We still had our copies of the data we’d won. Ancestry’s copies of the images, being the original ones created directly from the state’s films, technically didn’t come from us, so no credit was required. But was it right to cut all of our work and initiative out of the story? Was it ethical, or even just plain nice?

We will leave this question as an exercise for the reader.

Part XI: We share our toys

Meanwhile, Reclaim The Records took our hard-won copies of the statewide death index and returned our copies to the public domain, totally free, just as planned.

We uploaded everything to the Internet Archive, where people can flip through the pages of each year’s films for free, without any paywalls or logins. Most of the files are in good to excellent quality, except for a few years from the 1940’s, where even the state’s vault copies had deteriorated to a terrible degree, showing how critical it was that an organization like us had forced New York State to finally make a digital copy and preserve their own data.

We’ve also reached out to other non-profit genealogical organizations, including to regional groups like the New York Genealogical and Biographical Society (NYG&B), and the New England Historic Genealogical Society (NEHGS), giving them an early heads up about the impending release of the records and asking them if they’d like to host copies on their own websites. Both groups have enthusiastically agreed; the NYG&B has now added the state death index images to their website and the NEHGS will add the material in the near future. We’re also thrilled to hear that other genealogical organizations like FamilySearch and MyHeritage have made or will be making their own transcription projects for these images. Eventually there will be free copies of a text database of the New York State death index, not behind paywalls, for everyone to use.

Part XII: We FOIL Albany, Buffalo, and Yonkers

There are still a few loose ends to wrap up. The statewide death index was missing deaths for three cities for several decades; Albany, Buffalo, and Yonkers did not cooperate with the statewide registration requirements until about 1915, and their deaths are mostly missing from the index prior to then.

So Reclaim The Records filed three brand new FOIL requests with the city clerks’ offices for these three cities, asking for copies of their death indices prior to 1915. The acquisition and publication of that missing data may take another year to complete, depending on whether or not we will need to initiate legal action against one, some, or all of three of the agencies for non-compliance with the law.

You can read all the back-and-forth discussion with the three agencies here, at the MuckRock pages for our new requests: Albany, Buffalo, Yonkers.  (The Buffalo e-mails make for especially fun reading.)

Part XIII: MORE AWESOME RECORDS REAL SOON

So that’s the story of the New York State death index, and how we won it. Phew!

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