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*tap tap tap* Is this thing on?Reclaim The Records is back, with our first e-mail newsletter since late 2021! In case you forgot, we’re your favorite little "hey, what if a bunch of genealogy nerds banded together and decided to sue government agencies for better public records access?" non-profit group. Sorry about the extended newsletter hiatus, but we’ve actually spent the past year so frickin’ busy fighting the government that we, uh, kind of neglected to tell people about all the stuff we did fighting the government!And fight we have — and win! In the past year, since we last showed up in your inbox, we’ve won several lawsuits, filed several new lawsuits (including four just in 2023…so far!), and have taken other long-running lawsuits through full or partial wins at the lower court and now on up to the appeals level. We’ve also managed to get groundbreaking records collections that have never been online before anywhere, and some that have only previously been in the hands of government archive buildings (but only if you visited them in person), which will finally go online for free public use, and even made downloadable for free re-use!We have so much to tell you! Just to tease some highlights that we’ll finally discuss in future newsletters, which we intend to send much more regularly:– We won and received an updated dataset with millions of records about deceased US veterans from the Department of Veterans Affairs, after years of litigation against them. We actually won this case a few years ago (and won our attorneys fees, too, yay!), but the judge gave the agency almost two years of extra time to clean up the data before they had to hand it over to us, because it was just a hot mess.– We got copies of millions of vital records — not just indexes! real scanned certificates, finally! — from a number of states across the country, many of which have never been online before!– We sued three different federal agencies in new FOIA suits just last month! So many Zoom calls with our lawyers, OMG.– We are in the midst of appeals in three different New York cases (one of which we didn’t even tell you about yet), against multiple agencies! Because even when we win a case at the lower court level, New York sure doesn’t like to accept that without making our lives difficult. But that’s okay, like half our board is from New York or married to New Yorkers, and we know how to be stubborn, too.– We are soon going to be publishing hundreds of thousands of vital records from a certain mid-Atlantic state archive that used to charge for copies…until our first Reclaim the Records intern (we have an actual intern now, wheeeee!) socked them with some state freedom of information law requests, and the archive suddenly got real nervous…– Oh, and one of our board members just got sued by a different mid-Atlantic state archive (the hunter becomes the hunted)! See, that state got really mad that he beat them completely in that state’s freedom of information law’s ombudsman forum, over their refusal to make certain birth and death records and their transcribed metadata freely available to the public, and so the only way for the state to even try to appeal his (our) win was for the state to sue him personally… Don’t worry, we have an awesome lawyer on the case to get these records, and squish the suit. But this juicy story is for another newsletter…As fun as all of that may be, this particular newsletter will discuss our longstanding friendship *cough* with everyone’s favorite federal agency, the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS). The genealogical community has been at odds with USCIS for more than four years, ever since they tried to raise the fees for access to genealogical records to exorbitant prices. Although they abandoned their proposed fee hike in 2020 (well, after a judge made them) USCIS is at it again now, trying to raise the cost of many genealogical records by nearly 300%! The new fee is part of a larger fee hike, and the public can comment on this proposal until this Monday, March 13th. We hope that everyone reading this newsletter will submit a comment opposing this. Our friends at "Records not Revenue" have all of the information you’ll need to do submit a comment in opposition to the proposed fee hike.Every comment submitted by genealogists in opposition to the increase will show the agency how we will not stand for being their piggybank. Reclaim the Records submitted our own ten-page comment last night, alleging decades of records mismanagement, and announced a fun surprise at the end… We’re suing them. Again!Want to read all the details about our long-running "friendship" with USCIS? Want to read the actual lawsuit text from this lawsuit, and the one we filed and won last year? (Er, hi, we sued them last year and kind of forgot to tell everyone about it. But we won!)Well, then, read this newsletter, and let us know what you think. And make sure to submit a comment to the Federal Register about USCIS’ attempted fee hikes ASAP!Here’s the link for our newslettermailchi.mp/reclaimtherecords/the-return-of-the-records-rtr-vs-uscisAnd here’s the link to our friends at "Records, Not Revenue":recordsnotrevenue.comAnd stay tuned, as we work through our massive backlog of news and so many, many, many new free genealogical records coming soon to a website near you! 😁
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HUGE news for people with any known or suspected New York City ancestors or relatives! Like, HUGE.Okay, hold onto your chair because we’re about to say something nice about the New York City Municipal Archives: they’ve done something really good.Tomorrow morning, March 16th, the Archives is launching a brand new website with online scans of ALL of their historical New York City vital records. That means all historical birth certificates, marriage certificates AND the "new" marriage licenses, and death certificates, will all be put online as beautiful new color scans.And here’s the thing: the Archives is going to make them FREE. They’re not going to charge us to see them, nor to download them. They’re not going to try to scam us for money just to see non-copyrighted taxpayer-created historical records about our own families. They’re not going to sell them to Ancestry. They’re finally, finally going to follow the law and make these public records free to the public.This is a HUGE and very welcome departure from the usual behavior of the Archives over the past few decades. As just one example, this is the same agency that in the recent past had purposely forced FamilySearch to pull public access to their own scans of their own forty-year-old microfilms of these exact same vital records from all FamilySearch affiliate libraries (that is, public libraries around the world), leaving the only public access at actual Family History Centers, which are much fewer in number.This is the same agency that still has a horrendous "publish and use" contract in place, which they somehow want to make much worse (!), that requires researchers to ask the agency’s permission to reprint or reuse copies of historical non-copyrighted (and usually non-copyrightable!) public domain materials, in books or journal articles or other media. In fact, the contract is so stupendously illegal that it actually mandates that you turn over copies of your own negatives of the photos you take of "their" materials to the City of New York. Like some sort of bananas "Mother May I" permission slip, with a huge fee attached.This is the same agency that we have had to fight in court for SEVEN YEARS now, winning three separate Freedom of Information Law suits against them and with another very big FOIL suit still in progress against them, which we just filed in court last month.Even the multiple smaller FOIL requests we’ve made against them over the years, ones that somehow didn’t require a lawsuit, still took months and months of follow-ups and constant nagging, just to get some copies made of some old microfilms they hold. Dealing with this agency and trying to get them to JUST FOLLOW THE LAW, PLEASE has been an experience.And yet here we are four lawsuits later and…a cool new website is launching tomorrow? With free records?! OMG!(Gosh, we wonder what prompted their sudden change in attitude? 🤔)Anyway, their new site is not complete yet. Only about 70% of the vital records have been scanned and put online so far. There are still some big gaps, such as missing Manhattan death certificates after 1930. The search interface has some bugs, and isn’t great with soundalike names. The primary person’s name in a record is indexed, but the parents’ names generally are not. The index itself has typos, as you might expect when working off old handwritten sources.But. It’s online, it’s here, and it’s FREE for the first time. Credit where credit is due, even to an often-opponent, right?We don’t have the final website URL for you right now, but by the time you read this tomorrow, the Archives should likely have the link posted on their social media pages. And if you see it, please stick it in the comments as soon as it’s been made public. The site’s stability may go up and down with heavy traffic, so it might take a while before you can really use it. But it’s certainly worth checking out — and celebrating.
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