New York City (All Boroughs) Archives - Reclaim The Records

All already-digitized New York City historical records and their associated text metadata. (Yes, all.)

Brooke Schreier Ganz — Sat, 31 Oct 2020 00:08:08 +0000

A Freedom of Information lawsuit for these records is in progress

We filed a New York State Freedom of Information lawsuit, also known as an Article 78 Petition, against the New York City Department of Records and Information Services (DORIS), which is the parent organization of the New York City Municipal Archives, in the Supreme Court of the State of New York, County of New York (Manhattan), on February 14, 2022. Check the “Paperwork and Court Filings” tab below to read the legal documents.

What We Did and How We Did It
Paperwork and Court Filings

What We Did and How We Did It

PUTTING THE BIG APPLE’S BIG RECORDS ONLINE FOR EVERYONE

Faced with an unbelievably ridiculous attack on public records access in New York City, we’re taking matters into our own hands: we want to get the contents of the New York City Municipal Archives and put all the records online ourselves — FREE, FOREVER

Genealogists have just about had it with New York. Even for the kinds of quiet, conflict-averse nerds who actually enjoy digging through probate files, who have become inured to dealing with some of the most restrictive rules on historical public records access in the whole country, it seems like this month, October 2020, was when it all finally boiled over. Nights of emergency Zoom meetings, days of public comments — the New York genealogist, historian, and researcher community is beyond mad right now. And they have every right to be.

And we at Reclaim The Records want to tell you that story, and how we are starting to fight back against this government greed gone amuck.

Earlier this month, the New York City Municipal Archives did something unusually dumb. They announced a revision to their rules that would require all Archives researchers and patrons to request and obtain the Archives staff’s “permission” in order to use or re-use any images or historical records that they hold, even if those public records are very old or are entirely in the public domain. The Archives didn’t specify how or why this “permission” would or would not be granted, nor how to appeal if it were somehow not granted. Furthermore, the Archives says that researchers must then pay the Archives a blanket “licensing” fee for the use or re-use of those public records it holds, far above any actual copying costs, even for educational, scholarly, or non-profit use.

In other words, this taxpayer-funded public archive wants to limit your right to use, re-use, or re-publish every historical public document that you might ever want to obtain from them, in your articles or presentations or books or movies. If you’re a professional genealogist, they want to limit how you may legally re-transmit those records that you already bought to your client, or to a court if you’re working on a legal proceeding, or to a foreign government’s consulate if you’re working on a dual citizenship project. They even want to take ownership of any new scans or photographs that you might have made of those public records. They even have the nerve to ask you hand over copies of your new photo negatives to them, and then assign the rights to those negatives to the City of New York! And then as the cherry on top of the sundae, they want to you pay them extra for the right to do all this, too.

Don’t believe us? Well, check them out for yourself.

And the really crazy thing is that these revised rules aren’t even that much better or worse that the absolutely bonkers “contract” the Archives already hands out to people who want to use Archives materials! Go, read those conditions and bullet points slowly, but ideally not while you’re drinking a beverage.

That “contract” comes straight from an official New York City Municipal Archives e-mail account. We got tipped off to this scam of theirs about a year ago, when we heard through the genealogy grapevine that a researcher from Australia had reached out to the Archives over e-mail, asking them (although he legally had no real need to ask) if he could please make a scan of a 1906 NYC birth certificate for a minor celebrity and then add that new image to that person’s page on Wikipedia. The Archives actually told him he’d have to pay them if he scanned and posted the more than century-old public record he already had. And not that it should even matter for a non-copyrighted and very old totally public record, but Wikipedia is also, of course, a famously free non-profit website, not a commercial use.

We later found out that this wasn’t an accident or a one-off mistake. It was a policy, a dumb one. And the Archives’ attempts to revise that policy this month are now just making it more obvious to everyone that something is very wrong here. We know of no other public government archive, neither city nor state, in the entire United States that would dare have the chutzpah to attempt something so brazen. Only in New York!

Just to be really clear, almost all of these historical records held in the New York City Municipal Archives are government-created records, are in the public domain, were never copyrighted, and are likely legally unable to be copyrighted. They’re usually records that came directly from other government agencies, including even federal government agencies, some of which are long-defunct. Some of the records are fifty or a hundred or several hundred years old. Some of the records even predate the founding of the United States itself! They’re public records of our shared history, paid for by our taxes and our ancestors’ taxes. No one owns them, and no one ever will — or alternately, one could say that we all own them.

But the New York City Municipal Archives has apparently decided that nah, they control all those records, forever.

That’s just nuts

It sure is! And researchers and genealogists, especially those who do a lot of work involving old New York City records, are understandably outraged. In the Archives’ official public meeting about this rule change, held via videoconference on October 23rd, and through the City’s official Rules web portal, many people have given their testimony and made their very eloquent complaints known to the City. For example:

The New York Genealogical and Biographical Society (the NYG&B) created an excellent explanatory webpage about the “licensing” issue on their website, and you can also read their president Josh Taylor’s official public comment about the matter.
The International Association of Jewish Genealogical Societies (IAJGS) also wrote a very good letter in opposition to the rule, well worth reading for its specific details.
Even the nice people at FamilySearch, who are famously polite, submitted their own official letter of protest to the City over the situation. The best line in it: “You cannot license public records any more than you can license the use of the alphabet.”
And last but certainly not least, our own Reclaim the Records board member Alec Ferretti went so far as to compose and recite a series of limericks (!) for his official testimony at the public meeting. It was well-received by everyone who didn’t work for the City.

As far as we can tell, not one person who spoke at the public meeting, and not one person or organization who has submitted a public comment online, has been in favor of the new Archives policy — except for the Archivist.

What the heck does the Archives think it’s doing?

So far, the Archives has tried to handwave away all this criticism and uproar. They claim that these new “permissions” and “licensing” fees are like, totes normal, you guys, why you all so salty? They have instead attempted to raise two terrible defenses.

Their first claim, which the Archives has now said repeatedly, both verbally (including at that official public hearing) and in e-mail correspondence, is that none of these permission and licensing requirements were ever meant to apply to records being used for personal family history. However, that’s literally not what their own rules, which they authored, say. Now, that may be how they currently choose to interpret their own rules, but that doesn’t mean they can’t change that interpretation at any time in the future, and then yank the rug out from under everyone. If this is a public comment period on new rules, should they not heed the public’s overwhelming request for clarity in the actual wording of their own agency rules?

The Archives also claims that they have never charged for the use of “family history” records in the past, which as you can see from that guy-in-Australia-with-a-1906-birth-certificate-copy-on-Wikipedia e-mail chain we posted before, is clearly untrue. And in any case, they also seem to include only actual vital records (births, marriages, deaths) as the sole category in their imaginary “family history” rules carve-out. But what about all the researchers who use other historical public records also held at the Archives, like old tax records or the 1890 New York City “Police Census” or the Almshouse records, in their family research? Why should they need to ask special permission, or pay a dime for use beyond a reasonable one-time copying fee?

Secondly, at the public meeting, the Archives specifically cited the example of the nearby New York Public Library as a place that has similar licensing agreements and contracts required for the public use of their holdings, the implication being that requiring these permissions and then charging high fees for records access is just a normal and established precedent, and archives do it all the time, no big deal.

Of course, there’s just one little problem with that: the New York Public Library kind of isn’t a real public library, despite its name. They’re actually a private non-governmental non-profit corporation, originally created by the well-heeled Astor, Lenox, and Tilden families, which acts in partnership with the City of New York. More importantly, the NYPL’s holdings are explicitly not subject to the New York State Freedom of Information Law (FOIL).

The New York City Municipal Archives, though, is a real public agency, part of the New York City Department of Records and Information Services (DORIS), and its holdings most certainly are subject to FOIL. Heck, we dragged them to court twice in the past six years to prove that exact point to them! And FOIL clearly caps the allowed fees for the duplication of government-held public records, limited to the actual costs of duplication. And of course, the whole reason FOIL exists in the first place is to make it clear that the American people are allowed, with limited and enumerated exceptions, to view and copy government documents, without needing to first justify their intended use case to the government agency. That’s why it’s called the Freedom of Information Law, not the Freedom of Information Suggested Policy If We Feel Like It Today And If We Approve Of How You Will Use The Documents Now Pay Us An Extra Hundred Dollars And Give Us Your Photo Negatives Too.

In short, everything the Archives is doing and claiming here is all legally-unsupported malarkey. But so far, the Archives seems stubbornly unwilling to back down from their position and fix their rules, despite the public outcry. This stinks, this really stinks. What can we do?

The Genealogists Strike Back

Well, we at Reclaim The Records are fighting back in a big, big way. And we’re purposely choosing to do it in a way that will be impossible for the Archives to ever undo, no matter what kinds of new contracts they may draft in the future, or what kinds of new permission slips they say researchers are required to submit, or what new fees they want to impose on public access to public documents.

Last night, October 29th, we at Reclaim The Records formally launched the first of what will be many Freedom of Information requests (and probably many resulting lawsuits) asking for copies of the Archives’ files. And we mean we are going after alllllll the files at the Archives, image by image, file by file, records set by records set. We are no longer willing to leave these important historical documents solely in the hands of agencies who have shown, through their repeated bad actions, that they only want to control and profit from exclusive access to our shared history. We don’t trust them, and we want our public records back safely, and freely, in the hands of the public.

We are starting off this fight with a big new FOIL request for every single record that the New York City Municipal Archives has ever already digitized or scanned, regardless of whether or not those files were ever previously published online. Digital records are subject to FOIL, just as physical records are. So we are asking for full, unredacted, unwatermarked, full-size, high definition versions of everything they already have, and also all the text metadata and databases that go with them, delivered to us on hard drives. We’ll pay for the drives, of course, and for the shipping; that’s only fair. But since the files are already digital, and can be easily copied, that’s about it. No permissions, no licenses, just pay what the law requires and no more.

What does this mean? Well, for the majority of casual genealogists, this is the main thing:

Reclaim The Records is going to get every single digitized New York City birth certificate, marriage certificate, marriage license, and death certificate that the Archives currently has in its possession, and we are going to put them all online for free public use, without any restrictions, costs, paywalls, subscriptions, or copyrights.

This will mean that all of the genealogy websites you know and love, both commercial and non-profit, large and small, as well as individual researchers or teachers or journalists or anybody, will finally have access to download and re-upload and re-publish every single historical New York City vital record, for free. Millions and millions of them! And unlike the Archives, we won’t have any dumb “Mother, May I?” permission slips or shady licensing fees to line our pockets. It’s all gonna be free, forever.

Here is the text of the three-page New York State Freedom of Information Law (FOIL) request that we at Reclaim The Records submitted to the Archives last night. (Internally, we nicknamed this one the “Release the Kraken!” FOIL, for obvious reasons.)

The best part of all? In the past few years, the Archives has undertaken a multi-million dollar digitization project for the old NYC vital records, to finally scan them all in high definition and in color. If you were a patron sitting onsite in the Archives building in lower Manhattan — and alas, no one is right now, due to the pandemic — you could freely pull up these gorgeous new color scans on the Archives’ own computer system, or by connecting your personal laptop to their public WiFi. That means the new scans are public records, too.

But they’ve never gone online anywhere openly before, at least not these nice new versions. About forty years ago, FamilySearch did sign a contract with the Archives to get the right to make microfilm copies of the old black-and-white microfilms of these New York City birth, marriage, and death certificates. But then a few years ago, the Archives suddenly threw a big ole hissy fit, and refused to “let” FamilySearch continue to display their own images of their own legally-scanned microfilms on their own website. This restriction has had the effect of forcing researchers around the world to have to physically trek down to a limited number of Family History Centers during limited operating hours (or no operating hours at all, during the pandemic) to use their computers or their WiFi networks, just to see the old black-and-white images of New York City vital records — which, again, are public documents.

Furthermore, the Archives has very recently taken possession of decades of a different type of vital record, the three-page New York City Clerk’s Office marriage licenses, which are a totally different record set than the two-page Health Department marriage certificates. We at Reclaim The Records are actually indirectly responsible for that record set being de-accessioned to the Archives in the first place (you’re welcome!), because we won two separate lawsuits against the New York City Clerk’s Office in 2016 and in 2018 for the index to those marriage licenses. This spurred the City Clerk’s Office to finally hand over some of their older materials to the Archives. Those three-page marriage licenses were never available from anyone before, not even on the old FamilySearch microfilm reels, but they too have now been scanned in color over the past few years, although the work on this set is not completely done yet.

And all these vital records, the lovely new color high-definition versions, are going to go online for free just as soon as we get them. Forever.

Of course, you’ll still have to go through the Archives directly if you want to get a certified paper copy of a vital record, as the records we’re seeking will just be considered uncertified “informational” digital images. That’s fine, though, because for most people, especially genealogists, we don’t actually want or need legally-certified documents just to look up a relative’s name or find out the name of a cemetery where a great-great-uncle was buried.

But first, before we get too far ahead of ourselves, we have to go fight and win this new FOIL request, and the “Article 78” petition (lawsuit) it will probably spawn. But we’ve done that successfully with city agencies before, several times, including twice against this particular agency! So we’re not very worried about it.

If all goes well, we’re probably looking at winning the lawsuit and receiving the digital files by late 2021 or early 2022. It’s something to look forward to, in a coming year that we all hope will be better than this year.

We have not yet begun to fight

And this is just the beginning. We’re not just going after all of the Archives’ already-digitized image files and their associated text metadata. That’s because, of course, so very many of the wonderful holdings of the Archives were never scanned or photographed or transcribed in the first place.

Lots of these Archives records only exist on old microfilm reels. And so we at Reclaim the Records will also be making multiple new FOIL requests over the coming years (yes, years!) for some crucial microfilms that have never before been available outside of New York City. We’re looking at record sets like the “delayed and special birth certificates” for people who were born in New York City in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, but who did not have (or could not locate) original birth certificates and had to apply at a much later date, often because they needed Social Security or wanted to join the military during World War II.

We’re also looking at various other important record sets, whether they’re large data sets like the index to old NYC District Attorney case files, or even small one-reel or or two-reel series, like the listing of all New York City born and Puerto Rico born US soldiers who died during the Spanish-American War. There are a lot of interesting records in those vaults, and we want to get them all, digitize them, and throw them up online, bit by bit.

Fun fact: two years ago, we actually managed to get the first-ever mostly-complete list of every microfilm reel held at the Archives. We did it through a big separate FOIL request, back in March 2018, which did not require a lawsuit but did necessitate lots of painful back-and-forth e-mails to pull the data out of the Archives after they kept “forgetting” to include information about their own holdings. You can read it all here, if you like. If they were a competent government agency, the Archives would probably have a “here’s a big list of all our microfilm holdings” page somewhere on their own website, and then we could all just look at it — but they aren’t and they don’t, and hence all the tedious bickering.

We at Reclaim The Records are also thinking about what kinds of records are being held in the vaults at the Archives that have never been photographed or scanned or microfilmed, and which would be wonderful to preserve and put online before they crumble into dust. These old records are legally subject to New York FOIL too, although many precautions would need to be taken due to their fragility. For example, existing FOIL Advisory Opinions from the New York State Committee on Open Government indicate that an agency can mandate that no flash be used during the photography, or that only an experienced vendor may handle the old paper, which are certainly reasonable conditions. We’re not filing this kind of “we want paper records!” FOIL request just yet, but we will in the coming years.

(And you guys and all of your historical organizations can all file these kinds of fun records requests, too! Come join the fun! In fact, a little birdie told us that a certain well-known genealogy organization just filed their very first Freedom of Information request, asking for public copies of certain historical files. We’re so proud! But we’ll let them announce the news when they’re ready to go public.)

We also want our money back

We at Reclaim The Records are also busy planning a wholly new type of lawsuit against the Archives, a groundbreaking tactic that our organization has never used before, and one that we think probably no group in America has ever used against any government archive or library before.

See, we don’t want to just get the records back, although we do love records! But we also want to get researchers’ money back, for all the “licenses” they should never have had to pay to the Archives all these years, for all the public records the Archives does not own and has never owned — and will never own. Profiting off selling things you don’t own isn’t just gross, it’s fraud. And it’s especially gross when an official agency of the government does it to the public, and does it knowingly.

And we’ll have much more to say about that fun new project early next year. ?

And speaking of money…

You guessed it, this is the part where we ask you for donations to help support our work. And as you can see, we have a whole lot of work ahead of us, projects that will take years to see through.

But we have a habit of doing just that, and not letting these things drop, and of holding government agencies to account for their actions. Whether it’s suing Missouri and proving that they broke their own law knowingly and purposefully, or even taking on the US National Archives itself, we think big, and we get it done. And your continued support means we can keep hiring our awesome attorneys and planning new ways to go reclaim our records.

From all of us at RTR, thank you for your support! It means a lot.

UPDATE, February 2022:

Roses are red / violets are blue / on Valentine’s Day / we decided to sue.

After waiting almost exactly a year for a yes-or-no response to our FOIL request that never came — even though the law requires that an agency provide such a reply within twenty days — our attorney sent a letter to the Commissioner of DORIS on October 22, 2021, asking to appeal our request, since the lack of reply is equivalent under the law to a denial.

The Commissioner of DORIS wrote back to our attorney on October 26, 2021 saying that they had not in fact denied our request, they just hadn’t bothered to answer it yet, and they would quite soon. (They did not.)

And so on February 14, 2022, Valentine’s Day, we sued the New York City Municipal Archives for the fourth time in eight years, to try to reclaim more public records for the public.

Paperwork and Court Filings

Our FOIL request (October 29, 2020)

The full text of our three-page Freedom of Information Law (FOIL) request to the New York City Department of Records and Information Services (DORIS), parent agency of the New York City Municipal Archives

DORIS' proposed updates to their rules (October 2020)

Here's the full twelve-page PDF which mysteriously disappeared from the city website right as public comments started to flood in against it. Luckily, we had saved a copy in the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine...

The text of DORIS' existing "contract"

This is the top part of DORIS' existing "Permission to Publish or Use" contract. It's preeetttttty darn nuts. (Check out the part where they make you hand over the negatives of any photos you took!)

FamilySearch's letter (October 21, 2020)

Even the mild-mannered folks at FamilySearch wrote and submitted an official public comment against DORIS' proposed rules

IAJGS' letter (October 14, 2020)

The International Association of Jewish Genealogical Societies (IAJGS) also submitted an official public comment against the proposed rules

Our official FOIL Appeal (October 22, 2021)

Almost exactly one year after waiting for some kind of yes-or-no-answer to our FOIL request, our attorney filed a FOIL Appeal with the Commissioner of DORIS

Pretending An Appeal Was Not An Appeal (October 26, 2021)

The Commissioner wrote back and said that they hadn't actually denied our FOIL request, they merely hadn't answered it in a year and would do so eventually. (They did not.)

Our Article 78 Lawsuit (February 14, 2022)

Roses are red / violets are blue / for Valentine's Day / we decided to sue. Here's our "Verified Petition", which we filed on February 14, 2022.

State or Vital Records Jurisdiction: New York City

Archive or Library: New York City Municipal Archives

Government Agency: New York City Department of Records and Information Services (DORIS)

Law: New York State Freedom of Information Law (FOIL)

Record Type: Birth Records · Burial Records · Death Records · Education Records · Marriage Records · Military Records · Photographs · Slavery and Manumission Records · Tax Records · Voter Records

Record Years: late seventeenth century to mid twentieth century

Record Format: Actual scanned documents and photographs

Record Physical Format: Digital images and digital text metadata

Number of Records (Estimated): Unknown millions

The post All already-digitized New York City historical records and their associated text metadata. (Yes, all.) appeared first on Reclaim The Records.

Google’s “Research Project” with NYC’s Department of Records and Information Services

Brooke Schreier Ganz — Fri, 10 May 2019 02:27:49 +0000

What We Did and How We Did It
Paperwork and Court Filings

What We Did and How We Did It

In January of 2019, Reclaim The Records obtained copies of approximately two years of the daily Microsoft Outlook calendars for several New York City employees working at the Department of Records and Information Services (DORIS). These calendars included the lists of all meetings they had taken, whether in person or by conference call or other method, and with whom.

We discovered many interesting things in these calendars, including that the Commissioner of DORIS, Pauline Toole, and several other staffers, had been having multiple meetings with the tech company Google about a previously unpublicized and unknown project. Note that DORIS is the parent agency of the New York City Municipal Archives, one of the biggest and oldest public historical and genealogical record archives in the United States.

One calendar entry referred to a meeting with Google representatives about a “research project.” Another showed a meeting between a staff attorney for DORIS and Google’s own legal department at Google’s New York office, during which they then met via videoconference with Google’s legal department in California. And there were several other mentions of a Google “agreement”. Most interestingly, in October 2017, there was an explicit mention of “Google NDA” in a calendar entry — presumably meaning a Non-Disclosure Agreement of some sort, between a New York City agency and Google, which to our knowledge, had never been disclosed to the public nor reported in the press.

Why were New York City bureaucrats signing a secret deal with Google? What was this “research agreement”? We decided to find out.

In January 2019, less than a week after we received the calendar copies, we submitted a Freedom of Information request through New York City’s OpenRecords portal, directed to DORIS. Although far more than the legally mandated twenty business days have now passed since our request, Reclaim The Records still has not received a formal response nor any records from the city, just several extensions of the projected date by which they promise to tell us more. The most recent date that DORIS has provided for a response to our request is July 25, 2019. We’ll see what turns up.

Here’s the full text of the FOIL request we sent to the city:

FOIL-2019-860-00035

Title:
All DORIS agreements and communications with and/or about the Google “research project”

Description:
To Whom It May Concern:

Acting on behalf of the non-profit organization Reclaim The Records, and pursuant to the New York State Freedom of Information Law (1977 N.Y. Laws ch. 933), I hereby request the following records:

I am requesting copies of all correspondence, e-mails, proposals, drafts, notes, agreements, contracts, meetings and calendar entries, phone logs, meeting minutes, budget items, receipts, vendorization forms or data, bids, evaluation materials, Freedom of Information Law (FOIL) records requests and their associated correspondence and any appeals, and any other documentation or communications between any members of the New York City Department of Records and Information Services (DORIS) and Google, or within DORIS about Google.

To further aid in your search and records production, this request explicitly includes all materials associated with the mentions of “Google” in the official calendars of DORIS Commissioner Pauline Toole, Assistant Commissioner Ken Cobb, and DORIS attorney Lisa Velasquez, among others at DORIS, particularly those in the records management division and in the legal department. Meetings about a Google “research project” [sic] appear several times on their official calendars, as well as a “Google Agreement” [sic] and a “Google NDA” [sic] — which presumably refers to a non-disclosure agreement between DORIS and Google. (We would like to remind DORIS that NDA’s are not exempt under FOIL.)

We are requesting all of these materials for all dates between January 1, 2015 up through the date that this FOIL request is processed, inclusive.

In the event that there are fees, please inform me of the total charges in advance of fulfilling my request. I would prefer that this request be filled electronically, by e-mail attachment if available or USB hard drive if not. The requested documents will be made available to the general public, and this request is not being made for commercial purposes.

If any clarification is necessary, please feel free to e-mail me at info@reclaimtherecords.org.

Thank you in advance for your anticipated cooperation in this matter. I look forward to your response within five days, as required by the law.

Sincerely,

Brooke Schreier Ganz
President and Founder, Reclaim The Records
https://www.ReclaimTheRecords.org/

On June 27, 2019, we sent an update to this FOIL request:

Hi there, lawyers and bureaucrats of DORIS. We at Reclaim The Records originally submitted this New York State FOIL request to you, # FOIL-2019-860-00035, asking for copies of various Google-related documents, back in late January 2019. It is now late June 2019, which is far past the mandated legal deadline for responses to FOIL requests.

Your original acknowledgement of our request had an estimated reply of April 2019, which was more than twenty days out from January, and was therefore already a breach of FOIL’s timetable for response or records production. As you can see from the “note” attached to the request in this system, we protested that extension to you in late January. But you failed to reply to our note, nor give us any reason why there should be such a delay. Heck, you didn’t even give us the courtesy of providing a bad reason.

Then you extended your own FOIL reply deadline two more times, which seems like a pretty nice perk for a government agency to give itself, even if it is against the law.

In your most recent extension of your required reply, which bumped your estimated date to July 25, 2019, you wrote that it was because there’s a problem with the city’s ediscovery software vendor. However a great deal of the items we specifically mentioned in our FOIL request would also presumably be available to your agency in non-email systems and servers, such as copies of contracts or vendorization documents or receipts or meeting minutes or phone logs, etc. And yet you haven’t provided any of those non-email items yet either, not one record. Are you really claiming that all of those other types of records are wholly unavailable too?

So, we’re writing to let you know that the latest and greatest extension deadline you have set for yourself, which is July 25, 2019 at 2:00 PM, will be the final extension that we choose to accept from you. If you do not provide your reply and all of the requested documents on or before that date, we will consider this FOIL request to have been constructively denied by your agency — and we will move forward with all legal options, including a shiny new Article 78 petition and lawsuit in the Supreme Court of New York.

And since you guys, and your legal department, know very well that we at Reclaim The Records have happily and successfully sued you and won records from your agency, and from other city and state agencies, in multiple FOIL cases before, we hope you’ll recognize that we’re not bluffing here. We hope you’ll reconsider your tendency for procrastination and simply choose to follow the law, before we take you to court yet again.

Public records belong to the public, and these Google “research project” documents and your agency’s secret Google NDA are no different. Hiding or withholding public records from the public would be wrong for any city agency, but it is especially and hilariously wrong coming from the literal Department of Records.

Also, please give our best to your colleagues at Google, who are probably pressuring you guys to withhold some of these materials. And feel free to let them know that we look forward to discovering just how many other American cities have also signed these super-secret NDA’s and government agency “research projects” with their company. Maybe they should have Googled the phrase “freedom of information law” before they assumed all this could stay hidden?

Looking forward to your timely and legally mandated reply, as always.

sincerely yours,
Brooke Schreier Ganz, on behalf of Reclaim The Records
https://www.reclaimtherecords.org/

We’ll keep you updated about what we find out.

Paperwork and Court Filings

Documents related to this request are coming soon.

State or Vital Records Jurisdiction: New York City

Government Agency: New York City Department of Records and Information Services (DORIS)

Law: New York State Freedom of Information Law (FOIL)

The post Google’s “Research Project” with NYC’s Department of Records and Information Services appeared first on Reclaim The Records.

Geographic Index to New York City Births, late 19th to early 20th centuries

Brooke Schreier Ganz — Tue, 12 Jun 2018 01:02:57 +0000

The New York City Geographic Birth Index is now online

The New York City Geographic Birth Index for approximately 1880-1912 (sometimes through 1917) is now online for free public use at the Internet Archive. Some years are hard to read. The later years of this index, which exist through the late 1940’s or early 1950’s, will be the subject of an upcoming New York State Freedom of Information Law (FOIL) request.

What We Did and How We Did It
Paperwork and Court Filings

What We Did and How We Did It

Introducing the New York City GEOGRAPHIC Birth Index! This record set is an index to all births in New York City from roughly 1880-1912 (or 1917-ish in some cases outside of Manhattan). But unlike a typical birth index arranged by surname or by date, this one is arranged by the child’s place of birth, the actual exact street address! Hence the term Geographic.

We think there’s about 2.8 million names in here, maybe more.

Want to skip right to the records? HERE YOU GO, ENJOY! We always post our stuff to the Internet Archive for free, so you don’t have to worry about a paywall or a login or any of that stuff. You can even download all the records and republish them, no copyrights here. (Just please give us a shout-out and a link to our website in the credits or on your “about this database” page, thanks!)

Want to learn a little more about these records first, before you aimlessly scroll through half a million not-yet-text-indexed images? Great idea! Read on…

As you can see, these records are 3×5″ index cards, which were microfilmed and then digitized. They have an exact street address listed at the top of the card, or sometimes a small range of addresses all on the same street like “251-300 Clifton Pl.” The information on the cards includes the child’s date of birth, the child’s name, and the birth certificate number — after all, this is an index. But armed with this data, you can then go order a copy of the actual birth certificate from the city.

The cards were originally split into six separate groups: one for each borough (county) and a special sixth group that listed every birth that took place in New York City area hospitals, workhouses, prisons, and other public institutions — even the Ellis Island Hospital and the New York Lunatic Asylum. In later years in this record set, meaning into the early twentieth century, the city stopped separating out the hospitals and jails and other institutions out into the sixth group, and started listing them by their street address within their borough, just as if they were any other sort of building.

The names on each card are usually in roughly chronological order, but only within a four-year time period. There were separate cards and microfilm reels for each new four-year chunk. So for example, here’s Manhattan 1885-1889 part A, which is followed by Manhattan 1885-1889 part B, and so on, through part I. After that, they start again with the records for 1890-1894, and then 1895-1899, and so on.

And within each of those rolls of microfilms, representing each four-year timeframe, the cards are arranged alphabetically by street address. So, for example, births on Creston Avenue come just before births on Crimmins Avenue. However, note that directional markers are considered to be a part of the street name. So, for example, the cards for East Broadway are followed by the cards for East Houston Street, and so on.

And let’s give fair warning: some of the handwriting on these cards is unfortunately difficult to read, and some of the original microfilm quality is blurry. We were able to get brand new microfilm copies made from the city’s master copies in their vault, but it looks like the original microfilming of the cards all those years ago just wasn’t great. So we now have pristine copies of a not-great master version. *sigh*

Where did these records come from?

As far as we can tell, the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene created the original index cards, working off of the information on the original birth certificates. It seems as though they may have kept this geographic indexing going through at least the 1940’s or 1950’s, maybe longer; however, only the microfilms of these older cards, covering roughly 1880-1912 (or 1917-ish) were sent by the DOH to the New York City Municipal Archives. The more recent ones are probably in a city vault somewhere.

But we didn’t even know these records existed until we went to a genealogy conference and heard noted New York genealogist Jordan Auslander talk about them. (Thanks, Jordan!) See, the NYC Municipal Archives has this weird habit of not publishing any kind of finding aid or listing of all the great stuff they have in their archive, nor do they like to share the copies of their records with others, even though they’re required to do so by the New York State Freedom of Information Law.

In this particular case, the Archives did “allow” us to request and receive freshly made copies of these Geographic Birth Index microfilms without any kind of legal fight needed, for which we of course paid for all costs associated, just as the law requires. But more recently we’ve had to take the Archives to court to get simple copies of other just-as-legal records and OMG YOU GUYS they’re so ridiculous.

Anyway, we eventually got the ninety-six microfilm copies, and then our founder dragged the big heavy box of films on the plane with her to the annual RootsTech conference in Utah and she delivered them in person to, who else, our awesome friends at FamilySearch, who generously donated all the time and labor and equipment to digitize all of these microfilms for us. Thank you, FamilySearch!

And that means that these records are also available online at FamilySearch right now, in case if you prefer to use their website rather than the Internet Archive. We share!

By the way, we do plan to make a Freedom of Information request to the NYC DOH for the rest of the post-1912 Geographic Birth Index, too, the ones that didn’t make it over to the NYC Municipal Archives yet. That’s hundreds of more microfilms covering millions of more names! But at the moment we’re a little busy suing that same DOH, and suing that same Municipal Archives, and suing Missouri, and a bunch of other government agencies, so we’re just holding off for now until things calm down a bit.

Why would you need a geographic birth index?

Okay, so New York City already has a “regular” birth index for this same time period, and it’s publicly available at numerous genealogy websites, and covers varying years. But if you’ve ever worked with it, you know that it can be incomplete, or have wildly incorrect spelling variants making it hard to find a person you’re researching. That’s partly due to the fact that the original birth certificates in this time period sometimes had horrible handwriting and the index didn’t register the name correctly. Or quite often the original birth certificate showed a misspelling or an odd spelling variant of the first or last name, even varying from child to child within the same family. This was especially true for immigrant families, some of whom were illiterate or didn’t speak English, and about one third of New York City births were to recent immigrant families in this late nineteenth and early twentieth century time period.

When those first generation American kids grew up and suddenly needed a copy of their birth certificate, whether it was to register for Social Security or for entry into the Armed Services or for other reasons, this caused some problems, and led to the creation of numerous “Special” or delayed birth certificates in New York City, issued many years later. Yet many of those people really did have an original New York City birth certificate issued at the time of their birth — but it was just too hard for anyone to find them listed in the “regular” New York City birth index under an alternate or mangled version of their name.

Well, maybe if they had used this Geographic Birth index, things would have been easier. Let’s take a look at an example:

See those two kids listed at the bottom of the card: ‘Susie Neisman‘ born in 1882, and ‘Lucie Neiswand‘ born in 1884? Yeah, they’re sisters. They just had not-great spelling variants on their respective birth certificates, ones that would not have been picked up by Soundex codes or even through a phonetic search. And the “regular” New York City birth index would not have helped you figure this out, neither the database version created by ItalianGen that was created from the city’s own alphabetical microfilm index and later posted online at Ancestry, nor the index version on FamilySearch that was created from transcribing the actual birth certificates. (Go on, take a look online and see for yourself.)

But using this new Geographic Birth Index would help you figure this out, or at least give you a hint, showing two kids with similar surnames both born at the same address. Having an option to do look-ups by a location, which you might already know from a census or a directory, can really help. And this is just one example, from 574,243 cards in this records set.

And the total number of names in this records set: ….uh, we’re not sure. Some cards have a lot of names on them and some only have a few, depending on how many people lived at that address. But if we assume there are, on average, about five names per card, then this would be about 2.87 million records. This includes all those “special” delayed birth certificates that were issued later on, especially in the early 1940’s.

Sometimes you will even see cards in this record set with a stamp across the front saying “Expunged” — meaning that a person had applied for and received a delayed birth certificate, but then the city finally located the original birth certificate, and then they had to go back and invalidate (expunge) the later-created certificate.

We’ll close with this record from the set, which shows a girl who, based on the reported geographic location of her birth, may have been destined to grow up to become a genealogist:

Happy searching!

Paperwork and Court Filings

Documents related to this request are coming soon.

State or Vital Records Jurisdiction: New York City

Government Agency: New York City Department of Records and Information Services (DORIS)

Record Type: Birth Records

Record Years: Approximately 1880-1912, or 1917 for some boroughs.

Record Format: Index arranged by street address, usually broken up into five-year groupings, with a separate index for all New York City hospitals and jails (including Ellis Island)

Record Physical Format: 96 microfilms

Number of Records (Estimated): About 2.87 million records

The post Geographic Index to New York City Births, late 19th to early 20th centuries appeared first on Reclaim The Records.

Index to New York City domestic partnership records, 1993-2017

Brooke Schreier Ganz — Tue, 27 Jun 2017 21:15:47 +0000

This New York State Freedom of Information (FOIL) request is coming soon. Stay tuned!

State or Vital Records Jurisdiction: New York City

Government Agency: New York City Clerk's Office

Law: New York State Freedom of Information Law (FOIL)

Record Type: Domestic Partnership Records

Record Years: 1993-2017

Record Format: Index

Record Physical Format: Probably database

Number of Records (Estimated): Unknown

The post Index to New York City domestic partnership records, 1993-2017 appeared first on Reclaim The Records.

Index to New York City Marriage Licenses, 1996-2017

Brooke Schreier Ganz — Tue, 27 Jun 2017 21:09:58 +0000

This data is online at NYCMarriageIndex.com and the Internet Archive

The 1950-1995 and 1996-2017 portions of the index to New York City marriage licenses are now freely searchable online! Check out NYCMarriageIndex.com to search the names. You can even download the raw data files in spreadsheet, .CSV, or SQL format.

You can also check out the scanned microfilm images of the 1908-1972 portion of the marriage license data at the Internet Archive.

What We Did and How We Did It
Paperwork and Court Filings

What We Did and How We Did It

Back in 2016, Reclaim The Records filed a New York Freedom of Information Law (FOIL) request with the New York City Clerk’s Office, asking them for the first-ever public copy of the New York City marriage license index, for all marriages after 1930. The city failed to respond to the request at all, and then failed to respond to the FOIL appeal in the proper timeframe, so we took them to court. The city settled the lawsuit, handed over the marriage license index records for 1930-1995, and then paid our attorneys fees.

And that was pretty awesome. But in that settlement, we only won the data up to 1995, not up to the present day, because in the wording of our request, we had asked the city for a copy of their index. The problem was that starting in 1996, all New York City marriage licenses were “born digital” documents, created solely in a database, and there was no longer any separately-compiled index. To get those post-1996 records, we would have to write a brand new Freedom of Information request and word it a little differently, this time asking for a partial database extract rather than an index.

And so we did. In September 2017, Reclaim The Records filed a brand new FOIL request, once again with the New York City Clerk’s Office, asking for the continuation of that marriage license data, covering marriages from 1996-2016. Here is the text of our FOIL request; pay special attention to the last sentence:

To Whom It May Concern:

My name is Brooke Schreier Ganz and I am the founder and president of a 501(c)3 non-profit organization called Reclaim The Records. Pursuant to the New York State Freedom of Information Law (1977 N.Y. Laws ch. 933), I hereby request the following, on behalf of our organization:

We would like an extract of the database of all New York City marriage records from January 1, 1996 through December 31, 2016, inclusive. These records are held at your agency, the New York City Clerk’s office. Please note that we are not asking for any actual marriage certificates or licenses, which we recognize have strict privacy rules. We are only seeking a basic index or finding aid to these records.

This request is a follow-up to a successful FOIL request that I made of your department last year, where I asked for a copy of the index to New York City marriage licenses from 1930-2015. After your office neglected to respond to both my FOIL request and my FOIL appeal in a timely manner, I filed an Article 78 petition in the Supreme Court of New York in mid-2016. Your office eventually settled that case with me, paid my attorneys fees, and delivered the index, which consisted of more than one hundred microfilm copies and several Microsoft Excel spreadsheets. However, I had asked in that original request for an index to all marriage records through 2015, but my attorney and I were told by your office that you could only provide me with an index up to 1995. Your office told us that starting in 1996, there was no longer a separately compiled “index” to marriages conducted in New York City, as the data started to become “born digital” at that point, and was inputted directly into a computer database. I accepted this as part of our legal settlement, and so I agreed to only accept the separate marriage index through 1995.

Therefore, our organization is now asking for an extract of the information in this 1996-to-present marriage database, as this information would be analogous to a marriage index or a “marriage log” as defined in the law, and it would complete the years of information available to the public about New York City marriages.

We recognize that there may be parts of this marriage database that cannot be turned over in a FOIL request, as they would likely be infringing on people’s privacy. Under FOIL, your agency is still required to provide us a sub-set of the information in the database, removing any columns of data that are too intrusive.

We request that the columns of data in this database extract include — at the very least — the same fields of data you already turned over to me in my previous FOIL request, which you agreed at that time were acceptable under the law. These database fields include:

– Bride (or Spouse #1) given name
– Bride (or Spouse #1) middle name
– Bride (or Spouse #1) surname
– Groom (or Spouse #2) given name
– Groom (or Spouse #2) middle name
– Groom (or Spouse #2) surname
– date of marriage license application
– county or Borough of marriage license application
– marriage license number

In this case, we would appreciate your including any other database fields which may reasonably be disclosed under the law, such as:

– Bride (or Spouse #1) name suffix (i.e. “Junior”)
– Bride (or Spouse #1) sex
– Bride (or Spouse #1) city, state, and/or country of birth
– Bride (or Spouse #1) city, state, and/or country of residence
– Groom (or Spouse #2) name suffix (i.e. “Junior”)
– Groom (or Spouse #2) sex
– Groom (or Spouse #2) city, state, and/or country of birth
– Groom (or Spouse #2) city, state, and/or country of residence
– any other database fields or columns that are not explicitly disallowed under the law

Please refer to the following case for a discussion of what has already been deemed to be public and not-public in a New York marriage index: “Gannett Co., Inc. v. City Clerk’s Office, City of Rochester”, 596 NYS 2d 968, affirmed unanimously, 197 AD 2d 919 (1993).

Please also read the New York State Committee on Open Government (COOG)’s published Advisory Opinions on “Marriage Records” and “Matrimonial Records”, some of which are available online on their public website: http://www.dos.ny.gov/coog/foil_listing/fm.html They discuss what kinds of information in a marriage index or log are considered to be open to the public, and which ones can or should be withheld.

We would prefer to receive this database or database extract in SQL or CSV format, on a USB hard drive, with insured and trackable shipping to California; we will be happy to pay for all of this. The requested documents will be made available to the general public, and this request is not being made for commercial purposes. Please inform us of any potential charges in advance of fulfilling our 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. We look forward to receiving your response to this request within five business days, as the statute requires.

We very much hope that we will not have to take your office to court again.

SPOILER: We did, in fact, have to take their office to court again.

But we won again, and we got the records again, and the city had to pay our attorneys fees again, so hey, it’s all good.

The city tried to claim to us that providing a database extract, with some overly-personal fields and columns redacted, was akin to creating a brand new document, and that under NY FOIL they didn’t have to create a new record, only provide copies of records already in their possession. We pointed out that this was ridiculous; government agencies provide databases and partial database extracts under FOIL all the time! And it’s not like databases are some brand new technology and this was an unexplored corner of the law; there are literally decades of settled New York case law on this subject. The need to redact some parts of a data set does not absolve a government entity or agency from providing the rest of the data. But the city didn’t care, and they even flat out refused to respond to our FOIL Appeal — which is, y’know, illegal.

And just so we’re all clear about what kind of incompetence we were dealing with here, this city FOIL Officer making these ridiculous claims, and then failing to follow through on even responding to the FOIL Appeal, is not some minor clerk or office worker who didn’t know any better. No, this guy is an attorney who represents the city of New York. And he’s the very same dude who handled the previous marriage license FOIL request for us back in 2016, costing the city thousands of dollars in attorneys fees. He knew who we were when we made this request, and he knew our history of litigation, but he flubbed it all anyway, again. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Anyway, we filed our “Article 78” legal petition in the Supreme Court of New York in January 2018. The city settled with us in April 2018, we received the records at the end of May 2018. We uploaded the records and made them freely available to the public and announced our win in early June 2018. For the record, the city agreed to pay us $4,500 in attorneys fees — and that’s in addition to paying out however many thousands of dollars it cost them in their own attorneys fees. (Thanks, New York City taxpayers! Hope you guys weren’t planning on having a better use for that money in your budget.)

As part of the settlement, and because the request had dragged on for more than six months, we asked the city to provide marriage license data all the way through the end of 2017 rather than just 2016. We also asked the city to provide the actual date of the marriage, if known, rather than just the year that the license had been issued. We felt this was important, because sometimes people might get their marriage license at the end of one calendar year but not actually marry until several weeks into the new year. That meant that any information online about license dates might be misleadingly conflated with marriage dates. The city agreed to both of these terms in the settlement.

Finally, it’s important to note that New York State started legally recognizing same-sex marriages in June 2011. That means that for the 2011-2017 portion of this data, which is six and a half years of data, the database headers “Bride” and “Groom” are gender-agnostic and should be referred to as “Spouse #1” and “Spouse #2”. This change affects opposite-sex couples as well, because either party to a marriage after June 2011 could choose to list themselves in any order when filling out the paperwork. The city apparently did not add any new database columns to record either party’s sex.

Just as we did in our previous lawsuit two years ago, we’ve made this new marriage license data available for free public use. The city provided us with .XSLX (Microsoft Excel) spreadsheets of their database for 1996-2017. We took that data and cleaned it up slightly and exported it as plain-text .CSV files. We then imported them into a new MySQL database as new tables, and added an auto-incrementing ‘id’ field to each, since there wasn’t any primary key or unique key. All three of these file formats — a zip of the .XSLX files, a zip of the .CSV files, and the .SQL file — are available for free download at the Internet Archive, just as we had done for the 1950-1995 data set.

But those files are pretty big and hard to work with for most people, so we at Reclaim The Records have created a much easier way for people to search these records. We’ve uploaded the data to our website www.NYCMarriageIndex.com, where you can run all kinds of searches, including soundalike names, wildcard and partial name searches, nickname and name synonym recognition, filtering by year and/or by borough, and so on. It even has a prototype ranking algorithm, to show best matches first, like some of your favorite for-profit genealogy websites.

And yes, we do expect that all your favorite for-profit and non-profit genealogy websites will be loading this new 1996-2017 data set into their websites eventually. The more the merrier! All we ask is that they stick a tiny reference to Reclaim The Records and where the data came from in the “about this database” source box.

So, does this mean that every single year of New York City marriage data is finally online now? Well, almost. There’s one last data set we need to reclaim before we can check this off our to-do list: we still need to reclaim the records for all the people who got married, but couldn’t legally call it marriage, in New York prior to 2011. All people and all families deserve to have their records available. That’s why Reclaim The Records will soon be filing a brand new Freedom of Information request for a public copy of the New York City domestic partnership index. The NYC Department of Personnel began a partnership registry for city employees in August 1988, and the City Clerk’s Office began a formal registry for the general public in January 1993. (More details here.) The program was not discontinued even after the statewide legalization of same-sex marriage in June 2011, so we’ll be asking for this data all the way up through December 31, 2017.

And you know what’s funny? The agency to whom we’re sending this new FOIL request is once again the New York City Clerk’s Office, the very same people who have by now lost to us twice and spent thousands of dollars doing it. Maybe they’ll finally get their act together for this third go-round, but if not, we’ll be happy to take them to court once again.

Our thanks go out to our awesome attorneys at the law firm Beldock, Levine, & Hoffman in New York City for their help in successfully handling this case.

Paperwork and Court Filings

FOIL Appeal Letter

FOIL appeal letter sent to the New York City Clerk's Office on November 17, 2017.

Article 78 legal petition, filed in the Supreme Court of New York on January 10, 2018

The New York City Clerk's Office refused to even respond to our FOIL Appeal! So we sued them. ?

Stipulation of Settlement from New York City, received April 27, 2018

Once again, the city had to concede that they were breaking the law, and moved to settle the lawsuit. And once again they had to pay our attorneys fees.

State or Vital Records Jurisdiction: New York City

Government Agency: New York City Clerk's Office

Law: New York State Freedom of Information Law (FOIL)

Record Type: Marriage Records

Record Years: 1996-2017

Record Format: Index

Record Physical Format: Several .XSLX (spreadsheet) files, which we converted to .CSV and .SQL files for easier use

Number of Records (Estimated): 1,581,134 records, or about 3.1 million names

The post Index to New York City Marriage Licenses, 1996-2017 appeared first on Reclaim The Records.

List of Registered Voters in New York City for 1924

Brooke Schreier Ganz — Sun, 06 Nov 2016 18:08:10 +0000

The 1924 New York City list of registered voters is now online

You can now browse the images of this record set on the Internet Archive:

Brooklyn (Kings county) · The Bronx (Bronx county) · Manhattan (New York county) · Queens (Queens county) · Staten Island (Richmond county)

What We Did and How We Did It

Hello again from Reclaim The Records, your friendly neighborhood records access activists. In honor of the upcoming election, this month we’re bringing you a brand new voter-related genealogical record set, for free public use.

It’s the second-ever publication (but the first-ever digital and online publication) of the List of Registered Voters for New York City for the year 1924! It’s hundreds of thousands of names, perhaps over a million — we don’t know the exact number yet, but keep reading for some Nate Silver 538-style statistics and estimates.

These records were available in paper format ninety-two years ago, then stored in shrinkwrap and locked away in government warehouses for years. But now thanks to Reclaim The Records, the New York City Municipal Archives, and our first-ever joint project with an individual genealogist, they’re finally online!

This list of names is exactly what it sounds like, a list of everyone in New York City who was legally registered to vote in the 1924 election. It was originally compiled by the New York City Board of Elections and printed in the City Record, a daily government publication. That means that this kind of registered voters list isn’t under copyright and is potentially available under state Freedom of Information laws — which is exactly the kind of thing we like to acquire and publish.

The list is broken down by the five boroughs (counties) of New York City, and then each borough is broken down by their Assembly Districts. Here are the links to these newly online publications at the Internet Archive:

And then within each of those Assembly Districts (A.D.), the list is further broken down into Election Districts (E.D.) and then by street addresses.

Each one of these new documents is a series of high quality images or PDF’s that you can flip through like a book, zoom in close, or even download for offline use.

And here’s some more cool news: while there isn’t a formally transcribed database of these names yet, just a series of images, the original source was typeset and the digital photographs were very clear, so the Internet Archive was able to automatically OCR all of the names on the pages! That means that even without a transcription project being organized, you can already do a full-text “Search Inside This Book” for a particular name or street address you’re seeking in these files! Here’s an animated GIF showing how that would work:

Now, this automated OCR (image-to-text transcription) that the Internet Archive ran on the records is not perfect at all. Lots of o’s and a’s and e’s were mistaken for one another, and some other letters get switched too. But it’s a pretty good start and will help you find your way around the data.

The better way to find a name on this list is to look someone up in the 1925 New York State Census, which was held less than a year after this list was compiled, and note the borough, A.D., E.D., and address on a person’s census listing, and then go look up that same location information in this new 1924 list. Of course, that assumes that someone hadn’t changed addresses between their voter registration in late 1924 and the state census in early 1925, but probably not too many people did that.

Where did this information come from?

In early 2016, a New York and Florida based genealogist named Phyllis Kramer approached Reclaim The Records with an idea. Phyllis had heard about our success in obtaining records from the New York City Municipal Archives using state Freedom of Information laws. She wanted to know if the same FOIL process could be used to obtain copies of old voting and election-related materials. We figured, okay, let’s try that and see how it goes.

After some discussion, we picked 1924 as our target year. Our reasoning was that it was a presidential election year, so voter registration rates were likely to be higher, and there would probably be more names on the list. Furthermore, 1924 was shortly after the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment and we could finally start seeing female relatives’ names on the rolls. And World War I would have ended, so the men fighting overseas would have been back home to appear on the rolls, too. Finally, a significant percentage of the huge turn-of-the-century immigration wave to New York City would have completed the naturalization process by 1924, allowing them to potentially show up in the voter rolls too. It seemed like 1924 could be a good and fruitful year of data for genealogical research.

And so, Reclaim The Records’ first-ever joint project with a genealogist was undertaken to obtain the first public copy of this list in ninety-two years. We reached out to the Municipal Archives, and were told that we would not need to file a FOIL request for this project, we could just handle everything through e-mail this time, which was welcome news. We commissioned the first-ever digital imaging of the 1924 list from where it had sat in storage, after having been moved from the New York City Board of Elections’ warehouse. The Municipal Archives hired a photographer for the lists, and a few months later they sent us the beautiful new digital images (along with the bill). Reclaim The Records then combined the images into new PDF files, one per Assembly District. We uploaded the files to the Internet Archive back in September, but we waited to announce them until just before the 2016 Election. And here they are. Surprise!

What can I do with this information?

Well, for one thing, you’ll know whether someone was still alive and where they were living in the City in 1924, including women whose names might otherwise not show up in city directories or occupation lists. And it’s very nice to have a new typeset and non-handwritten source for names that might have tricky spellings.

But more importantly: if you see a name of interest here, you can then put in a request with the New York City Municipal Archives or New York City Board of Elections to obtain a copy of that person’s full one-page voter registration form, which will have all sorts of interesting and potentially useful information on it. The usual fields will be there, like name and address, but also tidbits like political party affiliation, how long they had been in the state and the city, and when they had last voted.

Was your great-grandma a registered Republican, Democrat, Socialist, or Other in 1924? Now you can find out!

But even more importantly, for New Yorkers who were naturalized citizens, those one-page voter registration forms will tell you the exact court name and the exact date on which they were naturalized. That information is otherwise fairly hard to determine, especialy if the person you’re researching had a common name, or if other sources, such as census information, are conflicting or inconclusive. If the voter had obtained citizenship through marriage, the voter registration form would also provide their spouse’s name.

And once you have that naturalization information from their one-page voter registration form, you can then locate and obtain a copy of their naturalization file from USCIS or the National Archives (NARA), and that file may have further detailed information about that person, such as their exact town of origin.

For more information about voter records, check out this informative PDF from Jan Meisels Allen, which includes a digital image of a 1920 New York City voter registration form.

I found a name! Now what?

If you see someone’s name on this list and you’d like to get a copy of their original voter registration form, here’s what to do:

Make a note of the BOROUGH the person was living in. That will determine which city agency has the records you want.
For Manhattan, Queens, and Staten Island (Richmond County), you will need to contact the New York City Municipal Archives, asking them for a copy of that person’s original voter registration form. The Archives does not yet have an online form for ordering this document. You will have to write them a letter by postal mail to order a copy, and enclose a self-addressed stamped envelope and a check made out to the New York City Municipal Archives for $15 (US). Make sure to include the YEAR (1924), the BOROUGH, the ASSEMBLY DISTRICT, the ELECTION DISTRICT, the STREET ADDRESS, and the person’s FULL NAME, just as it was spelled in this voter list. Include your name and mailing address, and a phone number or e-mail address so they can contact you with any questions. Mail your letter to:
New York City Municipal Archives
31 Chambers Street
Room 103
New York, NY 10007 USA
Don’t forget to enclose your check and your self-addressed stamped envelope.
For the Bronx and Brooklyn, the original voter registration books have not been transferred to the Municipal Archives yet. They may still be in a warehouse in New York City managed by the New York City Board of Elections. You will need to make a Freedom of Information (FOIL) request to the New York City Board of Elections. (Don’t worry, this is basically just writing them a letter.)In your letter, write that you are making a New York State Freedom of Information Law (FOIL) records request for a copy of a person’s original voter registration form. Make sure to include the YEAR (1924), the BOROUGH, the ASSEMBLY DISTRICT, the ELECTION DISTRICT, the STREET ADDRESS, and the person’s name, just as it was spelled in this voter list. Include your name and mailing address, and a phone number or e-mail address so they can contact you with any questions. Mail your letter to:
Board of Elections in the City of New York
32 Broadway, 7th Floor
New York, NY 10004 USA
ATTN: Records Access Officer / FOIL Officer
You can also try e-mailing them at FOILrequests@boe.nyc.ny.us. The Board of Elections should respond to your FOIL request within a few weeks, and if they find the record, they may require you to pay a small fee for the copy, perhaps ten or fifteen dollars.
No matter which agency you contact, we request that you please add the following line, or something like it, to your letter: “I was made aware of this information through the not-for-profit group Reclaim The Records, and their work to put genealogical data online for free public use.”
Finally, if you’re wondering if Lists of Registered Voters like this exist for other years, the answer is yes! And they’re public domain! It’s just that they were rarely thought of or used as a genealogical source before. However, not every year had their original full-page voter registration forms survive; some years had water damage or were lost.
And if you’re not particularly interested in New York City, why not contact your city-of-interest’s Board of Elections and find out what happened to your city’s old voter materials? Wouldn’t it be nice to have old voter registration lists and original voter registration forms available for places all over the country?

How many names are on this list?

This particular 1924 list, all the boroughs with all their Assembly Districts combined, contains hundreds of thousands of names, possibly over a million names — the exact number is unknown right now. Hopefully, some organization out there will undertake a formal indexing project of the names on this list to create a real text-searchable database. That would make doing look-ups for names far easier, and it would meant that we would finally discover the exact number of registered voters in the city in 1924.

In the meantime, we can try to estimate. In 1920 and 1930, the population of New York City looked like this:

Year	Manhattan	Brooklyn	Queens	Bronx	Staten Island	Total
1920	2,284,103	2,018,356	469,042	732,016	116,531	5,620,048
1930	1,867,312	2,560,401	1,079,129	1,265,258	158,346	6,930,446

Therefore, the total population at the time this list was made in 1924 was probably about six million New Yorkers. But a great many of them were under the age of twenty-one and were therefore ineligible to vote.

Another issue is that in 1924, a large percentage of the city was foreign-born, and not all of them had become naturalized citizens yet. Here’s the data for 1920 and 1930:

Year	Total Population	Total Foreign-Born	Percentage Foreign-Born
1920	5,620,048	2,028,160	36.09%
1930	6,930,446	2,358,686	34.03%

That means the percentage of foreign-born New Yorkers in 1924 may have been around 35%. A lot of those foreign-born New Yorkers were already naturalized, or in the process of naturalization, in 1924, but certainly not all. That would have cut down on the potential number of people in this list.

Additionally, New York State had passed an amendment to their state constitution in 1921, instituting “literacy tests” in order to register to vote. This amendment forced people who wished to register to prove that they could read aloud a section of the New York State constitution and correctly write and spell some of the words therein, or else prove that they had completed at least the eighth grade in school. (Source) This literacy test disqualified many citizens from exercising their right to vote, and therefore also reduced the number of names on this list, particularly amongst the immigrant community. (Literacy tests were finally outlawed in the United States under the Voting Rights Act of 1965.)

Finally, 1924 was only four years after women had finally gained the right to vote nationwide in the United States, and eight years after they’d won the right in New York State. Relatively few women’s names appear on this list of registered voters, far fewer than fifty percent of the names on this list. That number would slowly rise over the decades that followed. (In 2012, 53% of American voters were women.)

It would be an interesting project to count the names of the likely-female voters on this list, and see how that percentage might rise or fall by by borough, Assembly District, and Election District, to create a map or other visualization of female voter participation rates across New York City in 1924. It would also be interesting to note differences in the voter participation rate amongst different ethnic neighborhoods in the city, such as the Lower East Side, Yorkville, Harlem, Little Italy, Chinatown, or Hell’s Kitchen.

Can I use this data on another website, or for a project?

Sure! This data is in the public domain. There are no copyrights or restrictions on it, and you may use it as you wish. Yes, that means for-profit genealogy websites too.

Credits and Thanks

Thank you to Phyllis Kramer, who had the idea for this project! This was our first team-up project with an individual genealogist, and it turned out smashingly. And if you have an idea for an old records set you want to liberate from an archive or government agency somewhere, feel free to reach out to us and discuss it.

Thank you to the New York City Municipal Archives for helping to make this project possible, and for not making us go to court again to get records.

Shout-out to the New York State Committee on Open Government (COOG) for being a great (and free!) resource for learning about the New York State Freedom of Information Law (FOIL).

Paperwork and Court Filings

Documents related to this request are coming soon.

Browse the Records

COMING SOON.

State or Vital Records Jurisdiction: New York City

Archive or Library: New York City Municipal Archives

Government Agency: New York City Department of Records and Information Services (DORIS)

Law: New York State Freedom of Information Law (FOIL)

Record Type: Voter Records

Record Years: 1924

Record Format: Index

Record Physical Format: Digital Images and PDF

Number of Records (Estimated): 750,000+ (possibly over a million?)

The post List of Registered Voters in New York City for 1924 appeared first on Reclaim The Records.

New York City Birth Certificates, 1910-1917

Brooke Schreier Ganz — Sat, 17 Oct 2015 18:36:45 +0000

All New York City birth certificates that are more than 100 years old are supposed to be open to the public. Yet the New York City Department of Health has inexplicably failed to transfer these seven years’ worth of older birth certificates to the NYC Municipal Archives, which only has the certificates through 1909. Reclaim The Records will be making a FOIL request on or after January 1, 2018 to acquire and distribute these certificates to the public. We’re waiting until January 1st to make sure all of the 1917 certificates will be legally available and included in the request.

These certificates are available for individual ordering through the Department of Health; however, the DoH directs all online orders to a payment provider called VitalChek that incorrectly tells researchers that the 1910-1917 certificates are only available to the person whose name is on the certificate, or to their parent (who would presumably have been born in the nineteenth century!). The certificates have never microfilmed by FamilySearch. And the DoH has never given any reason why they are restricting access.

We’re going to change that.

More details to follow!

State or Vital Records Jurisdiction: New York City

Government Agency: New York City Department of Health

Law: New York State Freedom of Information Law (FOIL)

Record Type: Birth Records

Record Years: 1910-1917

Record Format: Certificates

Record Physical Format: Probably microfilm, but possibly paper-only

Number of Records (Estimated): 200,000

The post New York City Birth Certificates, 1910-1917 appeared first on Reclaim The Records.

Index to New York City Marriage Licenses, 1930-1995

Brooke Schreier Ganz — Fri, 16 Oct 2015 20:27:35 +0000

This data is online at NYCMarriageIndex.com and the Internet Archive

You can also check out the scanned microfilm images of the 1908-1972 portion of the marriage license data at the Internet Archive.

What We Did and How We Did It

Using the New York State Freedom of Information Law (FOIL), Reclaim The Records won the first-ever public access to the 1930-1995 marriage index for New York City, over five million records. Here’s how we did it, step by step:

December 14, 2015: Reclaim The Records writes a friendly “heads up” e-mail to the New York City Clerk’s Office, letting them know that we would soon be submitting a records request to them under the New York State Freedom of Information Law (FOIL). You can read that letter online here. We even provided for them the legal precedent under which we would be making the request. (For the legal nerds out there, it’s Gannett Co., Inc. v. City Clerk’s Office, City of Rochester, 596 NYS 2d 968, affirmed unanimously, 197 AD 2d 919 (1993).) We hoped this letter would ease the way for our records request and help make the whole process run smoothly. Turns out we were naive…

December 30, 2015: We formally submit our records request under the New York State FOIL. As usual, we use the website MuckRock to post and organize all our requests and official responses in real-time, visible to the public. Below is the full text of that letter, 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 a copy of the index to all New York City marriage records held at the New York City Clerk’s office, from January 1, 1930 through December 31, 2015 inclusive.

This information is available to the public under FOIL under the following case: Gannett Co., Inc. v. City Clerk’s Office, City of Rochester, 596 NYS 2d 968, affirmed unanimously, 197 AD 2d 919 (1993). See also the New York State Committee on Open Government (COOG)’s published Advisory Opinions on “Marriage Records” and “Matrimonial Records”, some of which are available online on their public website: http://www.dos.ny.gov/coog/foil_listing/fm.html

I request that the content of this marriage index be provided in full, except for any pieces of data that were explicitly declared by the 1993 Gannett case and by subsequent published Advisory Opinions from COOG to be infringing on the applicant couple’s privacy. For example, certain pieces of data such as the applicant couple’s names are clearly a matter of public record, while other pieces of data such as their exact street addresses may clearly be withheld for privacy.

But some pieces of data commonly contained in a marriage index, such as the applicant couple’s ages or dates of birth or places of birth, were never explicitly ruled by New York State courts to be either permitted or denied. COOG has written that these pieces of data may potentially be available to a FOIL requestor if they can show a “proper purpose” for the release of the information. I request that these “extra” pieces of information be retained in the index, as they are crucial for researchers and genealogists who wish to use this marriage index to disambiguate amongst people with the same common names and thereby locate their own family members. An index to eighty-five years of marriage records for a city like New York will likely contain millions of couples’ names; being able to separate out all the John Smith’s by year of birth and/or country of birth and/or age at marriage would be crucial to researchers and genealogists hoping to use these records to search for individual relatives or to follow broader demographic trends in the data.

I have reason to believe that the City Clerk’s office has copies of this index available in microfilm format for earlier years, possibly 1938-1950, and in computer database format for most later years, possibly post-1950. It is also possible that some years may have multiple formats available; for those years, I would prefer to receive the database format, unless the database is missing any information contained in the microfilm format.

The requested documents will be made available to the general public, and this request is not being made for commercial purposes.

Please inform me of any potential charges in advance of fulfilling my request. Please be advised that any microfilm copies made will also require shipping fees to California.

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.

Under NY FOIL, the City Clerk’s Office is required to acknowledge our request within five days, and give some kind of yes or no response within twenty days. They do neither.

January 14, 2016: We follow up by mail, asking for a response.

January 29, 2016: We follow up by mail, asking for a response.

February 10, 2016: At this point, not having heard any kind of response is legally considered the same thing as having the request be denied. Therefore, we lawyer up and formally file our appeal. The City Clerk’s Office is supposed to respond to our appeal within ten days. (At this point, it’s still all done through postal mail or e-mails, not a legal case.)

February 15, 2016: We follow up by mail, asking for a response.

February 23, 2016: The designated FOIL officer for the City Clerk’s Office, who is also their attorney, finally responds to our attorney, on the day the clock runs out on the appeal timeline. He agrees to provide only some of the records, claiming (correctly) that marriage certificates less than fifty years old are protected under New York State law. We agree, but remind him that marriage indices are supposed to be open under New York State law, without a privacy barrier. He tells us he’ll look into the legality of releasing the rest of the records, and will get back to us.

Late February and early March 2016: We wait to see if he will follow through on telling us what kinds of records they have (what formats are they in? what years do they cover?) and what kinds will be available to us. Our attorney e-mails and calls the City Clerk’s Office several times. They don’t respond to her.

March 16, 2016: By now, they’ve blown all their deadlines and we’re done waiting. We file our lawsuit. We posted our Notice of Petition legal papers here; go have a look if you want to see what a state Freedom of Information lawsuit looks like, all twenty-five pages of it.

March 21, 2016: We announce to the public in our Newsletter #7 that we’ve formally filed our “Article 78” legal petition, and that the City Clerk’s Office has been served with papers.

April 7, 2016: They’re due in court. They ask for a delay of a month to get their act together and figure out the answers to our questions about formats and years. We try to be nice, so we agree to the delay.

May 9, 2016: They’re due in court. They ask for another one month delay. We say okay again.

June 6, 2016: They’re due in court. They ask for another one month delay. We say okay again, but seriously you guys, this is the last time, get your act together already.

July 5, 2016: They’re less than twenty-four hours out from their court date, and suddenly they scramble to contact us and finally settle. We win! But we have to wait for the final stipulation papers to be signed for the settlement to take effect. We spend the next month wanting to shout the news from the rooftops, but unable to blab it publicly.

August 4, 2016: They’re less than twenty-four hours out from the day their thirty-day settlement deadline expires (are we noticing a theme here?) and they finally provide us a draft invoice for the microfilm copies, and the draft stipulation and settlement papers. We ask for two small additions to the settlement, one of them involving adding the shipping logistics in writing — we told them we want the records sent to us by FedEx or UPS, something with a tracking number, and carrying appropriate insurance — and the other being a question of whether they’ll take credit cards or check only. But everything else looks good, and our long-suffering attorney tells us we can finally publicize the news.

September 14, 2016: The final Stipulation of Settlement and Discontinuance papers are filed in court. You can read that here.

Here’s what we won

According to the terms of the draft settlement, our records are legally supposed to be arriving in the mail in the coming days. We haven’t actually seen them yet, but we’ve been told that the records are arranged like this:

We’re getting 110 reels of microfilm, covering just the 1930-1972 years of the marriage index. We have been informed that these microfilms are “identical in format” to the 1908-1929 marriage index microfilms we won from DORIS last year, which we put online for free public use back in April. Assuming that’s correct, these microfilms should also be broken down by borough (county), then arranged by year, then (sometimes) by section of the year, then alphabetically by first the two letters of the surname, and then finally separated out by brides and grooms.Under NY FOIL, people who win public records requests can get the copies for the actual costs of reproducing the records; the agencies can’t add any kind of mark-up to the price. That means that we just got millions of records for only $37 per microfilm roll plus one CSV file, which is a pretty great deal compared to the typical costs of most other record acquisition projects.
We’re also getting one text-searchable database, covering just the 1950-1995 years of the marriage index. This database was created for in-house use by the City Clerk’s Office. This is great news, because it means for these forty-five years of data there won’t need to be a new transcription project, since this is already transcribed and searchable! Of course, we won’t know how well they transcribed the handwriting on the files until we actually get to take a look at it, which we haven’t yet.We will be receiving this data as a CSV file, which is kind of like a very basic spreadsheet, on a USB thumbdrive. As far as we know, the columns of available data will be the same sort of basic data available in the microfilm images: surname, given name, year, borough, etc. However, two columns of data will be redacted from this database before they give it to us: the spouses’ dates of birth. (More on that below.)We’ll post this CSV file online for people to download and search through. But because this will have so many rows of data (probably millions!), it may crash traditional spreadsheet programs like Microsoft Excel, so we realistically may need to wait for an online service to add it to their website, or for some group make a searchable front-end for the data.Yes, of course everyone’s favorite for-profit and non-profit genealogy websites are welcome to integrate this new database into their online offerings — the data is in the public domain! But whether they will do so or not is entirely up to them.
This also means that there is some overlap between the microfilmed content and the text-searchable database content, so just for the 1950-1972 years of the marriage index, genealogists will be able to search for records in either format, scrolling through microfilmed images online and/or searching through the text database. (We assume most people would prefer to use the database format.)
Oh, and we won $4,580 in attorneys fees!

Here’s what we don’t know

We’re not sure whether the dates listed on these records will be the date that the couple originally applied for the license — usually a few days or weeks before the wedding took place — or if the date will be that of the actual marriage. Maybe the microfilms will have the application date, just as they did for the earlier 1908-1929 records, while the text database will have the actual marriage date. Maybe we’ll get both dates. We really don’t know. Guess we’ll find out!

Here’s what we didn’t win

To finally win these records in the settlement without enduring further legal hassles, we did have to compromise a little bit:

Compromising (temporarily) on the date range: We had originally asked the City Clerk’s Office for a copy of the marriage index for 1930-2015. But we only got it for 1930-1995. Why? Well, it turns out that starting around 1996, there isn’t any separate marriage index for these records! New York City switched to a “born digital” marriage database, with the information for all marriage license applicants being entered directly into the computer systems right at the City Clerk’s Office window.Luckily, the information in that 1996-present marriage database should still be legally available to the public under New York FOIL, as long as any overly-personal information gets redacted from the database first. But in order to get a copy of it, we’ll need to make a new and separate FOIL request, with more narrowly-tailored language, because we’ll now be asking for a partial database dump, rather than trying to cover these recent years of data with our “index” request.So, in order to complete this data set, Reclaim The Records will be making a new records request for the 1996-2015 (or perhaps 1996-2016) New York City marriage index later this year or early next year. Hopefully, now that the City Clerk’s Office knows us, and knows that we’re willing to take them to court if need be, and knows that they really are subject to the requirements of the New York State FOIL, they won’t fall down on the job so badly when they receive this new request.We are committed to getting this post-1996 marriage index data, too. For one thing, it just so happens that the founder of Reclaim The Records got married in New York in 2003, and she’d love a chance to legally liberate her own genealogical record, instead of just her ancestors’ records! For another thing, a 1996-2015 database would include all the same-sex couples whose marriages started to be recorded in New York City starting in June 2011, so this would (we think) be the first-ever genealogical marriage records data set open to the public on any website to finally include same-sex marriages. That definitely seems like a worthwhile thing to contribute to the world.So, we’re definitely going to file that follow-up records request, once we’re done processing all the details from this main request. We’ll let you know how it goes.
Compromising on the date of birth or year of birth: Because New York City is very large and a lot of people living there have the same names, we had originally asked the City Clerk’s Office to include the date of birth for each of the spouses in the marriage index. And indeed, that 1950-1995 in-house database they have does have that information available as database columns for the brides and grooms, although the older microfilms do not. But the City Clerk’s Office told us that birthdate data was too intrusive, we couldn’t get that. So we asked, could we perhaps just get the year of birth instead, dropping the month and day? Or even just get the couple’s age at marriage?Now, we wouldn’t have asked for this data at all, except that we know from our research discussions with the awesome and super-helpful New York Committee on Open Government (COOG) that the years of birth of the spouses in a marriage index is still a legally-grey unsettled area under New York’s FOIL. It has never been outlawed by the courts, like how providing street addresses was ruled to be intrusive, but it hasn’t been granted by them either, like how the names of the parties to the marriage are public. And the couple’s ages or years of birth are commonly included in lots of other states’ marriage indices, and they’re not generally thought of as a big deal. So we figured, why not try to push it and ask for the data here?But the New York City Clerk’s Office was adamant that nope, nuh-uh, sorry, we could not get any kind of birthdate data, not even just the year or just the age. So we sighed and we decided not to fight them on this issue, which could potentially have gotten us tied up in court for months. They will be redacting the birthdate columns from the 1950-1995 database before they give it to us. If we have to compromise a little, this seems okay to us.But we’re mentioning all this background here, just for the record, in case anyone reading this wants to try obtaining this piece of data through their own Freedom of Information Law records request someday.

Here’s what’s next

The 110 microfilms and the USB drive with the CSV file have been mailed from the New York City Clerk’s Office to us in California, via UPS. We’re eagerly following the tracking numbers.

Once the microfilms arrive, we’ll turn around and send them to the generous folks at FamilySearch in Salt Lake City, where they will all be digitally scanned for free on their professional-grade equipment. (Thank you, FamilySearch! And the next time you see them at a genealogy conference, will you please make sure to say thank you to them on our behalf?) When they’re done, the box of microfilms will be sent back to us, along with a portable hard drive holding all the newly-digitized images.

Then we’ll upload those images to the Internet Archive (archive.org) for free public usage, just like how we handled the earlier 1908-1929 marriage records, and how we’re about to release our New Jersey records. Because we’ll be uploading so much data, we’ll probably do at least some of this work onsite at their headquarters in San Francisco, where they have a ridiculously fast Internet connection. This project is going to be a lot of data to wrangle, with probably over 200,000 images to upload, so this may take a while, perhaps until the end of the year to get it all done.

The CSV file of the 1950-1995 searchable text database will also be uploaded to the Internet Archive. We’ll also start working with the Roots-Dev team of genealogy nerds (we say that with love, since our founder’s a member) to see if we can get some kind of standalone searchable version of that CSV data thrown together online.

And once everything’s done, we won’t really need to have the original 110 microfilms sitting around forever, so we’ll eventually be donating the films to the New York State Library in Albany — which, incidentally, is where we recently sent the box of the 1908-1929 microfilms we won from last year’s lawsuit. (But those of you who follow Reclaim the Records on Facebook already knew about our donation.) This should happen by early 2017.

Meanwhile, we’ll also be managing several other pending public records requests with several other agencies in at least two states, and more to be announced soon. Can’t stop, won’t stop.

Paperwork and Court Filings

Reclaim The Records vs. NYC City Clerk's Office - Petition

Read our Notice of Petition, filed in the Supreme Court of New York on March 16, 2016.

Reclaim The Records vs. NYC City Clerk's Office - Settlement

Read our Stipulation of Settlement and Discontinuance, which took effect on September 14, 2016.

VICTORY!

Photo of the microfilms we received

VICTORY!

Browse the Records

State or Vital Records Jurisdiction: New York City

Government Agency: New York City Clerk's Office

Law: New York State Freedom of Information Law (FOIL)

Record Type: Marriage Records

Record Years: 1930-1995

Record Format: Index Only

Record Physical Format: 110 microfilms for 1930-1972, six CSV (database) files for 1950-1995

Number of Records (Estimated): about 2 million for 1930-1950, and a little over 3.1 million for 1950-1995

The post Index to New York City Marriage Licenses, 1930-1995 appeared first on Reclaim The Records.

Index to New York City Marriage Licenses, 1908-1929

Brooke Schreier Ganz — Sun, 11 Oct 2015 04:08:21 +0000

This data is online at NYCMarriageIndex.com and the Internet Archive

You can also check out the scanned microfilm images of the 1908-1972 portion of the marriage license data at the Internet Archive.

What We Did and How We Did It

Reclaim The Records‘ first FOIL request, our pilot project, was an attempt to get access under the New York State Freedom of Information Law (FOIL) to the index to some old marriage documents that were stored only in the New York City Municipal Archives in lower Manhattan.

There are two sets of marriage-related records kept on-site at the NYC Municipal Archives. The better-known is the late 1800’s-1937 marriage certificates, originally kept by the NYC Health Department. There are two indices to this record collection, commonly called the “Brides Index” and Grooms Index”, to help you find the right document. Both the certificates and its indices are available on FamilySearch microfilm. They have also been transcribed and turned into a free searchable database through a volunteer-run project organized by non-profit genealogy groups. That volunteer-created transcribed database was also recently added to Ancestry.com.

If you’ve ever ordered a copy of your family’s New York City marriage certificate, this is almost certainly what you got: a brief two-page document from this Health Department record series.

But our FOIL request was not about those certificates.

Instead, we were trying to get public access to the index to a much lesser-known but very important record set. This set was originally kept by the New York City Clerk’s Office, and it is the 1908-1929 application, affidavit, and license for a marriage, a totally separate three-page document that is generally dated a few weeks before the actual marriage took place.

Why is this 1908-1929 “Application, Affidavit, and License” record group so useful to genealogists and researchers?

Several reasons! We’re glad you asked.

The document contains the witnesses’ addresses; the regular marriage certificate does not. This is useful information, as witnesses to a marriage may have been family members.
The document usually lists a more specific town of birth for both the bride and the groom; the regular marriage certificate often just lists the country of birth. Being able to narrow down a place of birth to more than just “Italy” or “Russia” is, of course, incredibly helpful.
The document lists both the bride and groom’s father’s and mother’s country of birth; the regular marriage certificate does not.
The document lists the names of any former spouses of the bride or groom, living or dead; the regular marriage certificate does not.
The document lists, if the bride or groom is divorced, when and where divorce or divorces were granted; the regular marriage certificate does not.
The document lists the bride’s occupation; the regular marriage certificate does not. Sometimes the actual employer name and address is given for both parties in the marriage, too; again, the marriage certificate does not.
And perhaps most importantly, this document usually has three different sets of handwriting in it! This certainly helps researchers who have had to deal with records that were semi-illegible or perhaps had “creative” spellings of names and places.

So as you can see, getting a copy of these records, in addition to the marriage certificates, is often beneficial to research. In fact, here’s an article from 1999 — “City Clerk’s Marriage Licenses, New York City, 1908–1937: One of 20th Century Genealogy’s Best Primary Sources” — where Kenneth Cobb, the director of the NYC Municipal Archives, goes on at length about just how very useful these records are. (This is the same Mr. Cobb who, sixteen years later, denied our FOIL request to obtain a copy of the index to these records.)

And here’s the thing: you can already order these three-page documents from the NYC Municipal Archives. But neither the documents, nor the indices to the documents, were available anywhere else but on-site at 31 Chambers Street in lower Manhattan. They weren’t scanned, they weren’t online, they weren’t transcribed, and they’re not on FamilySearch microfilm. They’re public documents, and yet the public didn’t have its own copy.

Our FOIL request, and our eventual Legal Petition, was seeking access to just the index to this record set, which exists on 48 microfilms. We weren’t seeking access to the full three-page records, which would have been hundreds of microfilms. We just wanted a way to make it easier to see what even exists in that record set in the first place, so that the records could be more easily usable by the public, who may not be able to travel in person to Manhattan to do their own look-ups.

We though this was a very fair request. And the New York State Committee on Open Goverment (COOG) agreed with us, and wrote this Advisory Opinion supporting the legal points of our case. Unfortunately, the Municipal Archives chose to ignore the Opinion, which meant we had to hire an attorney…

So…a lawsuit? Seriously?

Technically, we filed an “Article 78” Legal Petition; ReclaimTheRecords.org was the Petitioner, not a Plaintiff. This Petition sought to have a judge rule on the propriety of withholding these records from the public under the Freedom of Information Law, whereas a suit would be seeking damages.

We would have greatly preferred that the NYC Municipal Archives agree to our FOIL request in the first place, which would have avoided all this hassle. And indeed, they did initially agree to our request — on official letterhead! But then suddenly, for unknown reasons, they backtracked and withdrew their agreement. And then they denied our FOIL appeal. And then they ignored the Advisory Opinion from the New York State Committee on Open Government. So we had to do the whole lawyer thing.

AND WE WON.

We filed our legal petition in the Supreme Court of the State of New York, County of New York (Manhattan) on September 4, 2015. The city was supposed to answer our case in court on Friday, September 25th, but instead they came to our attorneys on Monday, September 21st to work out a settlement, which was entirely in our favor. We got every microfilm we wanted.

We’re currently working on getting the city to reimburse our attorneys fees, which is allowed under New York State’s FOIL in cases where a government agency basically had no legitimate reason to have denied a citizen’s records request. We won’t know if we also won the fees until closer to the summer of 2016. In practice, awarding attorneys fees in FOIL cases is more commonly awarded in areas of New York State outside of New York City. We’d put our odds at fifty-fifty.

What happened to the data?

46 of the 48 microfilms we requested arrived at our doorstep by registered mail on Wednesday, October 14th, 2015. The other two films had to be retrieved from a different city vault for copying and they arrived in late January 2016. The very generous people at the non-profit group FamilySearch scanned all of the films for us in February and March 2016, for free, on their professional-grade scanning equipment, and then they mailed us back all the microfilms and a new portable hard drive full of all the newly-digitized images. Thanks, FamilySearch!

Then we uploaded the images to the non-profit and extremely awesome Internet Archive (archive.org) in April 2016. By April 15, 2016, 44 out of the 48 microfilms were online for free use, and the last four films went online shortly thereafter.

AND HERE THEY ARE!: https://archive.org/details/nycmarriageindex

What happened to the original microfilms you won?

Once all the scanning and uploading was completed, we donated the 48 microfilms to the New York State Library in Albany in June 2016. Check out the thank you letter we received in the sidebar.

Will other websites post these images too?

We hope so, but that’s totally up to them. Yes, the for-profit genealogical companies will be also allowed to post these images to their own websites, if they want to do that. We hope they’ll choose to keep them freely available, not paywalled, but that’s up to them. Yes, non-profit groups and individual researchers can use and re-post these images too. The data is totally in the public domain, and the important thing is that this information is now online, for free, for everyone.

Are you going to lead an indexing and transcription project?

We really do hope that someone will turn the scanned images of this index into a transcribed and searchable database, to make life easier for researchers. But we’re leaving that entirely up to the genealogical community to figure out the details; we’re just interested in posting the data online and then moving on to our next batch of records requests. If one of the genealogical non-profit organizations or for-profit companies want to take that project on, that’s entirely up to them. We hope to have more details about this soon.

Paperwork and Court Filings

State or Vital Records Jurisdiction: New York City

Archive or Library: New York City Municipal Archives

Government Agency: New York City Department of Records and Information Services (DORIS)

Law: New York State Freedom of Information Law (FOIL)

Record Type: Marriage Records

Record Years: 1908-1929

Record Format: Index Only

Record Physical Format: Microfilm - 48 reels

Number of Records (Estimated): 450,000

The post Index to New York City Marriage Licenses, 1908-1929 appeared first on Reclaim The Records.

New York City (All Boroughs) Archives - Reclaim The Records

All already-digitized New York City historical records and their associated text metadata. (Yes, all.)

A Freedom of Information lawsuit for these records is in progress

PUTTING THE BIG APPLE’S BIG RECORDS ONLINE FOR EVERYONE

That’s just nuts

What the heck does the Archives think it’s doing?

The Genealogists Strike Back

Here is the text of the three-page New York State Freedom of Information Law (FOIL) request that we at Reclaim The Records submitted to the Archives last night. (Internally, we nicknamed this one the “Release the Kraken!” FOIL, for obvious reasons.)

We have not yet begun to fight

We also want our money back

And speaking of money…

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Google’s “Research Project” with NYC’s Department of Records and Information Services

FOIL-2019-860-00035

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Geographic Index to New York City Births, late 19th to early 20th centuries

The New York City Geographic Birth Index is now online

Where did these records come from?

Why would you need a geographic birth index?

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Index to New York City domestic partnership records, 1993-2017

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Index to New York City Marriage Licenses, 1996-2017

This data is online at NYCMarriageIndex.com and the Internet Archive

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List of Registered Voters in New York City for 1924

The 1924 New York City list of registered voters is now online

Where did this information come from?

What can I do with this information?

I found a name! Now what?

How many names are on this list?

Can I use this data on another website, or for a project?

Credits and Thanks

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New York City Birth Certificates, 1910-1917

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Index to New York City Marriage Licenses, 1930-1995

This data is online at NYCMarriageIndex.com and the Internet Archive

Here’s what we won

Here’s what we don’t know

Here’s what we didn’t win

Here’s what’s next

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Index to New York City Marriage Licenses, 1908-1929

This data is online at NYCMarriageIndex.com and the Internet Archive

Why is this 1908-1929 “Application, Affidavit, and License” record group so useful to genealogists and researchers?

So…a lawsuit? Seriously?

What happened to the data?

What happened to the original microfilms you won?

Will other websites post these images too?

Are you going to lead an indexing and transcription project?

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