Freedom of Information Act (FOIA)
What's worse than government agencies illegally pretending that the public data they hold is copyrighted, private, or can only be seen when sold to the highest bidder?
Well-known large non-profit genealogy groups doing the same thing.
Not naming names here, but ugh, so gross.
Here's #FOIA in Le Carre's Smiley's People. Page 53 in my edition. https://twitter.com/resentfultweet/status/1303062707189448706
On my fourth Death Merchant novel and finally got some Reagan-era #FOIA slander:
@ReclaimTheRecs All 10 of my immigrant ancestors never naturalized because Asian immigrants to the US weren't allowed to obtain citizenship until 1965.
Raise your hand if you've ever found any immigrant ancestors who never naturalized (for whatever reason) on various federal and state census records. 🙋♀️
More on #CENSUS2020 today: Court blocks Trump order to exclude undocumented immigrants from Census count https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/social-issues/trump-census-documents/2020/09/10/6c2bdcce-f3a0-11ea-bc45-e5d48ab44b9f_story.html
Move over, @BeineckeLibrary, there's a hot new contender for Best Historical Subtweeting.
Neither rain nor sleet nor piles of letters can stop these #USPS workers! This #PhotoOfTheWeek highlights #PostalWorkers and the impact of organized labor. Read the full #POTW blog post here: https://bit.ly/3ikdcgc #tbt #ThrowbackThursday #BHSArchives #BrooklynHistory
I'm on the phone with an IRS agent who doesn't believe my name is real and I'm like you're the actual government, you would know.
Hey. We know we've been quiet on Twitter for a few days, but it's only because we have SO MUCH going on behind the scenes!
In no particular order: writing and filing our first amicus brief, receiving millions of new files, planning new lawsuits, meetings galore.
Stay tuned. 😊
@ReclaimTheRecs You are a hero to genealogists. It drives me crazy seeing the wildly different "privacy" laws between states -- just look at PA vs NY for death certificates. Keep holding them accountable & working to raise awareness for open records! ❤
@ReclaimTheRecs Cheering you on for standing up to government agencies! They are the ones who are NUTS! Reclaiming the records is reclaiming all of our family histories. I'm sure our ancestors would be proud.😉
HELLO, YONKERS! Reclaim The Records has won our Freedom of Information fight for the birth and death records from Yonkers, New York! They’re now online, and free!
After literally years of negotiating and haggling (although luckily stopping short of yet another lawsuit), we are pleased to announce this first-ever publication of tens of thousands of late nineteenth and early twentieth century births and deaths for Yonkers. We’ve photographed the alphabetical indices, and for most years we were able to photograph the full birth and death registers, too!
And none of these record books had ever been available to the public to use or browse before, not even on microfilm at a library. And the people listed in these records were generally *not* in the statewide birth and death indices that we previously acquired and published for New York.
These photos are all new, and they’re gorgeous.
Click here to read our latest newsletter with all the details, and with direct links to all the now-online record books, which span from roughly 1875 to 1916, with a few gaps:
mailchi.mp/reclaimtherecords/reclaim-the-records-wins-lawsuit-for-missouri-state-birth-index-and-…
Thanks to our attorney Dave Rankin for handling all the legal paperwork that finally got the Yonkers City Clerk’s Office to stop messing around and give the public our rightful access to these important historical records. And a special shout-out to our intrepid RTR board member Jonathan Webb Deiss for going on a road trip last October to laboriously photograph these books for us.
And if you’re happy to see these kinds of free (and copyright-free) historical records go online, we hope you’ll consider making a donation to support our work — so that we can do more of it, and reclaim more records for more towns and cities and states.
Enjoy!
Our groundbreaking Sunshine Law victory against the state of Missouri, in our fight for copies of the birth index and death index, is making headlines around the country! Here’s Pulitzer Prize winner Tony Messenger of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, who has covered our story for four years as part of his beat, with a new column about the dénouement:
www.stltoday.com/news/local/columns/tony-messenger/messenger-judge-blasts-state-of-missouri-over-…
🎉 WE WON! WE WON! 🎉 We won our long-running Sunshine Law case for the Missouri birth index 1920-2015 and the Missouri death index 1968-2015! These text indices are going to go online for free public use, both searchable and downloadable, and they’ll never be locked up by the state again!
And we were also awarded our attorneys fees by the judge! And those will probably be in the low six figures. Thanks, Missouri taxpayers!
And we even were awarded FINES against the Missouri Department of Health and Senior Services, for their four separate "knowing and purposeful" violations of the law! Fines are very hard to get, and as far as we know, no one’s ever won MULTIPLE fines against a state agency in a Missouri Sunshine Law case before. But we did!
MWAHAHAHAHAHA! 😁
Read all about it in our latest newsletter:
mailchi.mp/reclaimtherecords/reclaim-the-records-wins-lawsuit-for-missouri-state-birth-index-and-…
Or you can jump right to the judge’s fifty-three page order, in our Motion for Summary Judgment here (PDF):
www.reclaimtherecords.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/reclaim_the_records_vs_missouri_dhss_-_summa…
Our sincere thanks go to our intrepid attorneys Bernie Rhodes and Taryn Nash at Lathrop Gage in Missouri, for shepherding this case through four and half years of hard and careful work.
And thank you to all of you, for your continued support for our open records work! We’re going to keep doing this kind of work, state by state and city by city, until all genealogical and historical public records go online for free public use, as they should be!
Reclaim The Records is an IRS-recognized 501(c)3 non-profit organization. Our EIN is 81-4985446. Contact us at [email protected]
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