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EXTRA, EXTRA! Front page news report in Albany about just how awful NYSDOH – New York State Health Department has been at fulfilling all of our records requests for years!Oh, and the first public mention of Reclaim the Records’ latest NEW YORK LAWSUIT WIN! 😁“[Reclaim The Records] last month won a lawsuit seeking an updated, usable death index, or list of people who have died in New York dating back to the late 19th century…The importance of a statewide index is due to its completeness, said Schreier Ganz. Her group had been repeatedly rebuffed by the health department when it tries to get lists such as death indexes through the state Freedom of Information law. That prompted them to sue in state Supreme Court in Albany County.The health department is appealing the court’s decision in recent weeks that such an index should be made publicly available.”We’ll have more to say about our legal fight for the first-ever up-to-date and FREE public copy for the New York State death index in the near future. Stay tuned 🙂
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*tap tap tap* Is this thing on?Reclaim The Records is back, with our first e-mail newsletter since late 2021! In case you forgot, we’re your favorite little "hey, what if a bunch of genealogy nerds banded together and decided to sue government agencies for better public records access?" non-profit group. Sorry about the extended newsletter hiatus, but we’ve actually spent the past year so frickin’ busy fighting the government that we, uh, kind of neglected to tell people about all the stuff we did fighting the government!And fight we have — and win! In the past year, since we last showed up in your inbox, we’ve won several lawsuits, filed several new lawsuits (including four just in 2023…so far!), and have taken other long-running lawsuits through full or partial wins at the lower court and now on up to the appeals level. We’ve also managed to get groundbreaking records collections that have never been online before anywhere, and some that have only previously been in the hands of government archive buildings (but only if you visited them in person), which will finally go online for free public use, and even made downloadable for free re-use!We have so much to tell you! Just to tease some highlights that we’ll finally discuss in future newsletters, which we intend to send much more regularly:– We won and received an updated dataset with millions of records about deceased US veterans from the Department of Veterans Affairs, after years of litigation against them. We actually won this case a few years ago (and won our attorneys fees, too, yay!), but the judge gave the agency almost two years of extra time to clean up the data before they had to hand it over to us, because it was just a hot mess.– We got copies of millions of vital records — not just indexes! real scanned certificates, finally! — from a number of states across the country, many of which have never been online before!– We sued three different federal agencies in new FOIA suits just last month! So many Zoom calls with our lawyers, OMG.– We are in the midst of appeals in three different New York cases (one of which we didn’t even tell you about yet), against multiple agencies! Because even when we win a case at the lower court level, New York sure doesn’t like to accept that without making our lives difficult. But that’s okay, like half our board is from New York or married to New Yorkers, and we know how to be stubborn, too.– We are soon going to be publishing hundreds of thousands of vital records from a certain mid-Atlantic state archive that used to charge for copies…until our first Reclaim the Records intern (we have an actual intern now, wheeeee!) socked them with some state freedom of information law requests, and the archive suddenly got real nervous…– Oh, and one of our board members just got sued by a different mid-Atlantic state archive (the hunter becomes the hunted)! See, that state got really mad that he beat them completely in that state’s freedom of information law’s ombudsman forum, over their refusal to make certain birth and death records and their transcribed metadata freely available to the public, and so the only way for the state to even try to appeal his (our) win was for the state to sue him personally… Don’t worry, we have an awesome lawyer on the case to get these records, and squish the suit. But this juicy story is for another newsletter…As fun as all of that may be, this particular newsletter will discuss our longstanding friendship *cough* with everyone’s favorite federal agency, the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS). The genealogical community has been at odds with USCIS for more than four years, ever since they tried to raise the fees for access to genealogical records to exorbitant prices. Although they abandoned their proposed fee hike in 2020 (well, after a judge made them) USCIS is at it again now, trying to raise the cost of many genealogical records by nearly 300%! The new fee is part of a larger fee hike, and the public can comment on this proposal until this Monday, March 13th. We hope that everyone reading this newsletter will submit a comment opposing this. Our friends at "Records not Revenue" have all of the information you’ll need to do submit a comment in opposition to the proposed fee hike.Every comment submitted by genealogists in opposition to the increase will show the agency how we will not stand for being their piggybank. Reclaim the Records submitted our own ten-page comment last night, alleging decades of records mismanagement, and announced a fun surprise at the end… We’re suing them. Again!Want to read all the details about our long-running "friendship" with USCIS? Want to read the actual lawsuit text from this lawsuit, and the one we filed and won last year? (Er, hi, we sued them last year and kind of forgot to tell everyone about it. But we won!)Well, then, read this newsletter, and let us know what you think. And make sure to submit a comment to the Federal Register about USCIS’ attempted fee hikes ASAP!Here’s the link for our newslettermailchi.mp/reclaimtherecords/the-return-of-the-records-rtr-vs-uscisAnd here’s the link to our friends at "Records, Not Revenue":recordsnotrevenue.comAnd stay tuned, as we work through our massive backlog of news and so many, many, many new free genealogical records coming soon to a website near you! 😁
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