Hi. Please excuse the all-caps, but we’re currently hyped up on a sugar high from the pumpkin pie, and a records-high from OVER A HUNDRED YEARS OF NEW AND TOTALLY FREE GENEALOGY RECORDS THAT WE JUST PUT ONLINE and we’re all pretty darn excited.

Ahem. We at Reclaim The Records are so proud to finally announce one of our largest record acquisitions to date: millions of vital records spanning over one hundred years of history for the state of Maryland.

These records have never previously been publicly available online anywhere else — not on FamilySearch and not on Ancestry and not on MyHeritage and not on [insert some other genealogy website here] — except for some records that had only been available at the Maryland State Archives‘ internal website, if you happened to be sitting in their building in Annapolis and using their in-house computers, or on their external website, but only if those records were more than a hundred years old.

This announcement is groundbreaking for us at RTR. Not only is this an unusually large cache of materials for one of our records projects, but this time, our acquisition was not limited to a basic name and date index — although we did get those, too! — but in addition to the decades of vital records indices, we also got the digital images of the actual birth, marriage, and death certificates for the state of Maryland. Yep, the real certificates. And now we’ve put them online, free!

And this story isn’t a pitch to subscribe to anything, because we don’t sell data, we release it. There isn’t any login or password for these files, and you don’t have to pay a dime to a government facility, nor to a paywalled corporate-run site. These records are all now just plain free. You can browse them, download them, or do whatever you like with them. (Of course, if you’d like say thank you for their new freedom, please skip to the very bottom of this extremely long page for a suggestion about how to do that.)

So, sit back and recover from your Thanksgiving overindulgence, while we tell you all about these amazing new files!

 

Here’s What We Got

These records cover the entire state of Maryland. And we honestly have no idea how many there are of them in total, but saying “several million? probably more than five million?” seems like it’s in the right ballpark. Maryland may be a small state, but this haul is more than a century of material, and it covers more years and more types of records than even their own state Department of Health officially counts.

But for the city of Baltimore, which is distinct from the larger county of Baltimore, the records were often kept separately by their own city Department of Health, and were often not included in the “statewide” record sets. Generally, when the so-called “statewide” records here refer to “Baltimore” prior to about 1972, they’re only referring to locations in the county of Baltimore, and not the independent city. So if you’re looking for someone from Maryland, you’ll often need to check through two different sets of data.

You can skip down to the bottom of this page for a big helpful table listing every record set and line item we got, cross-referenced with the Maryland State Archives’ thorough catalog, but here’s the basic information, summarized:

BIRTHS:

We received scanned images of actual Maryland birth certificates for 1898-1922 statewide, including certificates for Baltimore City since 1875.

We also got the basic Maryland state birth index for 1898-1951, and a separate Baltimore City birth index for 1875-1941 and 1950-1972. There is no separate Baltimore City birth index for 1942-1949 at the Archives, so for those years you can use try using the state index.

To be clear: birth records in Maryland are restricted for a hundred years, hence the 1922 cut-off on publishing copies of actual certificates, but that rule doesn’t apply to the basic name/date text index, and therefore many more decades of data are available for the index.

MARRIAGES:

We received scanned images of millions of actual Maryland marriage certificates for 1914-1940, June 1951-1988 and 2007-2013 statewide! (*wooooo!*) Note that these are generally organized by county, and then semi-chronologically within each county.

Why are there gaps? Well, 1941-June 1951 exists at the Archives, but they have not been scanned yet, so we didn’t get copies. 1989-2004 are scanned and legally available to the public, but only when ordered one at a time directly from the Archives, because the standardized marriage form for those years unfortunately listed both parties’ Social Security Numbers on it, and those numbers need to be manually redacted from each digital image case-by-case. 2005-2006 are scanned and don’t have the issue of SSNs on the forms, but we’re still working on getting them.

(One certainly could make a perfectly legal Maryland public records request for all of those 1989-2004 marriage records in bulk, and have the Archives staff work on the image redactions, but then that requester would also have to bear the costs of the staff’s work at their hourly rates for all those images and…well, we were quoted an estimate in the low six figures. We thought about it, but demurred. But maybe one of the larger and deeper-pocketed genealogy websites out there will consider doing such a thing someday, HINT HINT.)

We also received a statewide marriage index for (UPDATE: 1914-1930 AND) 1951-2013, with some years having separate indices for brides and for grooms.

A statewide marriage index also exists for 1914-1930 at the Archives (item S-1498), but it has not yet been scanned by the Archives. UPDATE! in the two weeks since we first published this Maryland Motherlode records announcement, a generous donor has stepped forward who had personally scanned the 1914-1930 “Male” marriage index record set S-1498 at the Archives several years ago, and he has now donated a copy of the images to RTR, which we have now added to the free online materials. So that now fills a previous hole in our marriage index data, yay!

But those previously-mentioned not-online marriage records for 1941-1951 still do not have any index at all, alas. Perhaps the Archives will make an index for those years, in the future.

There initially was no separate Baltimore City marriage index from 1914-1940 at the Archives. Luckily, the Archives just wrapped up a big indexing project for those years, which can now be both viewed and text-searched at FromThePage. There are other ongoing indexing projects the Archives is currently running to fill other gaps in their existing indexes; you can check out all of the official Archives transcription projects here and maybe you’ll want to volunteer some of your time to help them. Some independent organizations have also run their own indexing projects; for example, a Baltimore City marriage index for 1915-1919 is available for Maryland Genealogical Society members on their society’s website.

DEATHS:

We received digital copies of Maryland death certificates for 1898-2012 statewide, including certificates for Baltimore since 1875. We’re talking about millions of records here, actual full death certificates with tons of information (including parents’ names!), never before available like this.

We also received the statewide death index for 1898-1968 and 1973-2014. For whatever reason there is no Maryland statewide (excluding Baltimore City) death index for 1969-1972 at the Archives. But there is an online index created by the Baltimore County Genealogical Society for those years, and of course, the original death certificates are now available for those years as well.

We also received the Baltimore City death index for 1875-1972, with some years (1875-1880 and 1943-1949) even existing in duplicate index formats.

Most of these death indices are new digital scans of old dot matrix print-outs from old databases, or of old books compiling the lists of deaths by year. For some years, the death index data is also available in annual .CSV or text data files, all ready to transform into a text-searchable database.

NATURALIZATIONS:

And we even managed to get some naturalization data too — namely the card index to immigration and naturalization records for multiple courts in both Baltimore County, 1796-1851, and Baltimore City, 1827-1933.

These files are digital scans of microfilms of handwritten 3×5″ index cards, sorted roughly alphabetically by surname, identifying the court, the time frame, and the volume or folio number. There are 76 PDFs in just this one collection, and each PDF has about one thousand images, so that means …*quickly mashes buttons on calculator app*… maybe about 76,000 names just in this naturalization index alone? Sweet.

Altogether, the diverse group of materials we requested and received covers more than thirty record series, and more than five and half terabytes of data. Most were scanned by the Archives into high resolution images that were then saved as PDF format, but a few are presented as raw images or as text files.

 

Gimme!

So, where are the records, and how can you check them out? Well, it’s an almost overwhelming amount of material, so to see direct links to each specific type of content in a much more detailed and useful tabular format, keep reading to the end of this page for a helpful guide. But if you really want to dive right in, we have uploaded everything we got to the Internet Archive and here is that OMG LOOK AT ALL THIS AMAZING STUFF link you’re looking for.

You can browse through the PDFs/images on their site, or even download the files directly to your hard drive. There are also one or two items in that collection where you may see a notification that “this item is currently being modified/updated by the task: derive” which means that the Internet Archive servers are still churning through some of the immense set of files to automatically create derivative images and formats, but this process should probably be complete in a few more days.

(We’ve actually been shoving so much great new genealogical content onto their website that we also briefly broke it a few days ago. Oops.)

There are no copyrights or usage restrictions on any of these records. We wouldn’t be surprised if some or all of the basic indices or full certificates also show up on some of your favorite Big Genealogy websites soon — but that’s totally up to them. Whether those websites might also choose to eventually make a new transcription project to index the actual certificate data beyond the existing government-created basic indices — for example, perhaps to create a first-ever index that would include the names of parents and spouses listed on certificates — well, that is also entirely up to them.

(But we sure hope they do, HINT HINT YET AGAIN.)

 

How did you get all these records?! And how did they go online?

The short answer: Let us now praise a plucky young genealogist-intern-professor armed with the power of the Maryland Public Information Act!

The longer answer: Last year, we at Reclaim The Records were contacted by genealogist, adjunct faculty at BYU-Idaho, and friend-of-RTR Michael W. McCormick, who was busy wrapping up his PhD in Public History at Middle Tennessee State University. As part of his program, he needed to do an internship somewhere related to his degree for several months. Michael loves genealogy and he bravely wanted to learn the ropes about the multitude of nationwide Freedom of Information (FOI) laws, and help get more records released to the public. And so even though we at RTR are a bit of an ad-hoc bunch of troublemakers who don’t have fancy things like “an office” or “employees” or “regular work hours” Michael became RTR’s very first formal intern. And he totally rocked it.

We set Michael to task on two main projects during his internship, one of them our idea and the other one his idea. The first of the two was months of research on a giant up-to-date compendium of all FOI laws and vital records laws nationwide, built in Airtable (which is like a giant online spreadsheet/database), which is a project you’ll be hearing more about in a future newsletter. And the second major project Michael worked on was getting tons of Maryland records and putting them online, and as you can see, the man deserves an A+ for that one.

Our RTR board member Alec Ferretti mentored Michael and taught him the ins and outs of how to make a state level Freedom of Information law request, and how to research some of the common exceptions and pitfalls. Michael set to work learning how that generalized FOI knowledge applied to Maryland specifically, whose own state law is called the Maryland Public Information Act, or the PIA. And while these vital indices and certificates were (mostly) originally created by the Maryland Department of Health, Michael knew that copies of the records were stored at the Maryland State Archives (the MSA) in Annapolis, but had never been widely available to the public. As we’ve long been telling people, state FOI laws do really grant you the right to obtain copies of historical records held at government archives and libraries. And in our experience, this route is generally a lot easier and nicer than requesting records from Departments of Health.

In other words, we did not have to sue the Maryland State Archives, or anyone else in Maryland, to get any of this data released (phew!). We just had to research the relevant state FOI law (here, the PIA), research the state vital records laws, find the legal justifications for acquiring certain materials as compared to any internal policies about making certain types or years of material available or not, and then put it all together. We sincerely thank the Maryland State Archives and their Director of Special Projects for their cooperation, and we acknowledge their significant efforts in fulfilling our sizable request. They followed their state law beautifully, unlike some other places we have described in previous editions of this newsletter.

In recent decades, the MSA has done extensive work to digitize many of their most-used records. For several years, Maryland vital records have been digitally available to patrons from computer stations in their reading room. Those digitized files are generally linked to their associated archive catalog entries. The catalog with the linked records is also available to search from any internet connection, even if the records were not. So that was a decent start.

But the access that RTR is now providing in this project is even better and goes beyond what the Archives was already providing to patrons in-house, even for those record sets available online within their catalog. While most of these files could be downloaded as a PDF equivalent to a complete archival item containing perhaps a few thousand certificates, certain records such as birth certificates were only available in a proprietary online image viewer that would show from one to ten pages at a time. This made navigating to a desired certificate considerably more difficult. The MSA’s proprietary viewer also lacked the variety of modern features available in the Internet Archive’s viewer.

The Archives also had limited the records they placed on their external website to vital records from at least a hundred years ago. They had stated the reason for their limitation as follows: “Those [certificates] under 100 years old are available on the computers in our Search Room and are not made publicly available from home because they [may] contain Social Security Numbers [of dead people].” The work of the Records Preservation and Access Coalition (RPAC) of the International Association of Jewish Genealogical Societies (IAJGS) and the National Genealogical Society (NGS), among other national advocacy bodies, has established that Social Security Numbers of deceased individuals in genealogical records are not a justifiable privacy concern. Despite this, the Archives’ policy stood; you had to be inside the Archives building, using their computer terminals, for any links to more recent records to work.

But Michael, being the best RTR intern we’ve ever had, knew better than to just accept what a government agency said they could provide, and he read the actual law on what could be provided, or at least not explicitly denied or redacted. And it turns out that Maryland state law dictates that deaths as recent as ten years ago are legally open to the public. The Archives’ own one-hundred-year external restriction policy was only an arbitrary rule added by their administration, and not the law. And furthermore, there were also no legal restrictions on marriage record access in Maryland.

(Kids, be like Michael: if you want a public record, read what the actual state law says, not what an agency’s administrative policy says. Laws overrule policies!)

So, armed with the actual law instead of the policy, Michael’s PIA request successfully argued for the additional ninety years of death records, which were not previously online if you were outside the building, and all marriages to the most recent year the Archives had cataloged, which is currently 2013. For these ninety years of records MSA had declined to make available online, they did offer researchers the option to order certified copies for $25 or uncertified copies for $5. But even at that price point, the cost would quickly prove impractical when doing projects that look at a considerable number of individuals or families. Our groundbreaking acquisition allows researchers to move beyond cost-prohibitive arbitrary access restrictions on public documents.

 

This is a lot. Can you summarize?

Sure! All the files we got may be found in Reclaim The Records’ Maryland State Archives collection on the Internet Archive. There are lots of sub-collections within that larger collection, and then there are “items” (record sets, broken up roughly by the original Archives catalog entries and organization) in each sub-collection as well. You can use or page through almost all of the images and PDFs right on that website, but some of the files are just so large that you may have to download them (whether one-by-one or entire sets) to your computer in order to view them. There are some gaps in the records where the Archives was missing data for certain years, or where the Archives has the data but had not yet created and cataloged digital versions, or where a few years are legally available if you contact the Archives directly but cannot go online en masse at this time. The table below notes the series included in our collection, as well as significant gaps.

VITAL RECORDS & NATURALIZATIONS – BASIC INDICES
Jurisdiction	Type	Years	Series	Format
BIRTH INDICES Baltimore Birth Index* & Maryland Statewide Birth Index
Baltimore City	Births	1875-1941	CM-1134	PDF
* There is no Baltimore-specific birth index for 1942-1949 at the Maryland State Archives.
Baltimore City	Births	1950-1972	T-1344	PDF
Maryland	Births	1898-1909	SM-199	PDF
Maryland	Births	1910-1951	SM-27	PDF
MARRIAGE INDICES Baltimore Marriage Index* & Maryland Statewide Marriage Index**
* There was originally no Baltimore-specific marriage index for 1914-1940 at the Maryland State Archives. but luckily the Archives has recently completed an in-house indexing project for these years though FromThePage, making them text-searchable. Some independent organizations have also run their own indexing projects; for example, a Baltimore City marriage index for 1915-1919 is available for Maryland Genealogical Society members. ** A statewide Maryland marriage index exists for 1914-1930 (Archives series S-1498), but it is not (yet) scanned, and so it is not available here. UPDATE! The marriage index for 1914-1930 was digitized by researcher Greg Burton at the Archives several years ago, and he has now donated a copy of all the images to Reclaim The Records. While actual marriage certificates since 1941 are available at the Archives as a not-yet-scanned part of the statewide collection, unfortunately no index exists (yet) for the 1941 through June 1951 certificates.
Statewide	Marriages	1914-1930 (NEW!)	SM-1498 Not yet scanned by MSA	PDF (Male) – Data scanned and donated to RTR by researcher Greg Burton
Statewide	Marriages	1951-1968	SM-223	PDF (Male)
Statewide	Marriages	1951-1968	SM-224	PDF (Female)
Statewide	Marriages	1969-1972	SM-225	PDF (Male)
Statewide	Marriages	1969-1972	SM-226	PDF (Female)
Statewide	Marriages	1973-1989	S-1851	PDF
Statewide	Marriages	1973-1988	SE-163	PDF Supplement
Statewide	Marriages	1990-2013	SE-144	PDF
DEATH INDICES Baltimore Death Index & Maryland Statewide Death Index*
Baltimore City	Deaths	1875-1972	CE-42	PDF
Baltimore City	Deaths	1875-1880, 1943-1949	S-1483	Text
Maryland	Deaths	1898-1944	SE-58	PDF
Maryland	Deaths	1945-1968	SE-8	PDF
* There is no Maryland (excluding Baltimore City) death index for 1969-1972 at the Archives. However, statewide death certificates are available for those years, so the certificates can be viewed individually, or refer to the Baltimore County Genealogical Society’s death index.
Statewide	Deaths	1973-2014	SE-151	PDF
Statewide	Deaths	1973-2014	SE-151	Text
NATURALIZATION INDICES Baltimore City and Baltimore County Naturalization Index
multiple courts in Baltimore County and City	Naturalizations	late eighteenth century through 1933	S-1416	PDF

 

VITAL RECORDS – CERTIFICATES
Jurisdiction	Type	Years	Series	Format
BIRTH CERTIFICATES Baltimore Birth Certificates & Maryland Statewide Birth Certificates
Baltimore City	Births	1875-[1922]	CM-1135	PDF
Maryland	Births	1898-1910	S-1963	PDF
Maryland	Births	1910-1913	S-1988	PDF
Maryland	Births	1914-[1922]	SM-35	PDF
Maryland birth records are restricted for one hundred years, so more data should become available from the Archives through future Public Information Act requests.
MARRIAGE CERTIFICATES Baltimore Marriage Certificates* & Maryland Statewide Marriage Certificates**
Note that marriage records are generally organized by county, and then somewhat-chronologically within each county.
* Baltimore City marriage certificates for September 1915 through May 1916 are missing from the Archives. Baltimore City marriage certificates from September 1922 through June 1924 exist at the Archives but were not yet scanned at the time we requested copies, and are not included here.
Maryland	Marriages	1914-1930	SM-184	PDF
Maryland	Marriages	1930-1940	S-1951	PDF
Baltimore City	Marriages	1914-1940 (with gaps): – Sep 1915 to May 1916 not at Archives; – Sep 1922 to Jun 1924 at Archives but not all scanned yet	S-1738	PDF – Gap where Sep 1922 to Jun 1924 files were not yet provided
** The statewide marriage certificates for 1941-June 1951 do exist at the Archives as item S-1772, according to their finding aid, but they have not yet been scanned and so copies are not publicly available yet. Unfortunately, there is also no corresponding marriage index for these years.
Statewide	Marriages	June 1951-2004 (1989-2004 only available on a per-image basis directly from the Archives; see below.)	S-1864	PDF – Duplicates part of SM-259. We used this series to obtain copies of marriage certificates for 1985-1988.
Statewide	Marriages	June 1951-2007 (1989-2004 only available on a per-image basis directly from the Archives; see below. 2005-2006 also at Archives, see below.)	SM-259	PDF – Our coverage of SM-259 stops in 1985, with some overlap between SM-259 and S-1864.
** Statewide marriage certificates for 1989-2004 are available to researchers directly from the Archives on a per-record basis, but they cannot be given out unless each record’s image first has any Social Security Numbers redacted by Archives staff. These records are legally possible to acquire in bulk, but the redaction work would be expensive, and we opted not to do so. Marriage certificates from 2005-2006 do not have this issue, but we did not receive copies of them from the Archives. They may be available to view digitally if within the Archives building.
Statewide	Marriages	2007-2013	SE-154	PDF
DEATH CERTIFICATES Baltimore Death Certificates & Maryland Statewide Death Certificates
Baltimore City	Deaths	1875-1949	CM-1132	PDF
Baltimore City	Deaths	1950-1972	CE-502	PDF
Maryland	Deaths	1898-1910	SE-42	PDF
Maryland	Deaths	1910-1951	SE-43	PDF
Maryland	Deaths	1951-1969	SE-44	PDF
Maryland	Deaths	1969-1972	SE-45	PDF
Statewide	Deaths	1973-[2012]	SE-46	PDF
Maryland death records are restricted for ten years, so more data should become available from the Archives through future Public Information Act requests.

 

Until another genealogy organization (or company) fully indexes this enormous collection of materials, the Maryland State Archives catalog still remains the definitive finding aid. You can start there at their Reference & Research page. Next, select Birth Records, Marriage Records, or Death Records. You will then select the area and period you are researching. This will show you which archival series covers that jurisdiction and time. Once you click the appropriate series you will find a description of how that series’ records are organized, followed by a list of items within the series. Which item you need will depend on how the series is organized. You will usually need to go to the associated index series first to locate a name in an index. This will provide a certificate number which you will match to the record within the correct series and item to obtain the certificate. The organization of the files we added to Internet Archive is the same organization utilized at the Archives, but that organization varies widely from series to series.

And yeah, we know this is all kind of complicated, so please consider supporting indexing initiatives for these records. The Baltimore County Genealogical Society has an ongoing indexing effort for statewide births and deaths, and the Maryland State Archives has ongoing projects for indexing marriage records at FromThePage. Both indexing initiatives are accepting volunteers! While these projects are not affiliated with Reclaim The Records, we encourage any interested persons to refer to these projects.

 

Wow. This is a lot.

Yeah. This is one of the biggest hauls of records our organization has ever gotten, and we could not have done it without Michael’s dedication and months of work.

But you know what? There are a lot of other cities and states out there where we could also be doing this kind of thing, figuring out how the law and the local policies of government agencies and archives might intersect (or not) and how that can potentially lead to the freeing of millions of records that then go online forever. So even when there aren’t any expensive lawyers or crazy lawsuit stories, this is still the kind of important (and sometimes tedious) Records Reclaiming work that needs a lot of community support, just to make it possible.

And that’s where you come in HINT HINT ONE MORE TIME. We’d love a whole fleet of interns like Michael, or ideally clones if possible, spending all day every day identifying and obtaining and uploading new records. But for that goal, we need your help (and perhaps someday, a cloning device). Funding to enable big records projects like these comes from genealogists and historians and open data fans around the world, and we can’t do it without you all. But we think you’ll agree, the eventual payoff is pretty sweet.

So, if you have some leftover slices of pumpkin pie, or something like that, we would very much appreciate some of it. And we at RTR thank you very, very much for your awesome support. We really appreciate it.

Hello again from Reclaim The Records! Today, we come to you with a long-awaited present: millions of new free genealogy records — or at least, new searchable and downloadable indices to those millions of records, and helpful instructions on how you can order the underlying certificates, even very recent ones. And of course, we also have yet another Kafkaesque story about why the world is still missing public access to even more years of this great data, and how we’re working to fix that.

Introducing ConnecticutGenealogy.org! It’s a FREE searchable database of 576,638 births, 2,180,700 marriages, 2,086 civil unions, and 2,772,116 deaths from the state of Connecticut, spanning three centuries. Some of this data had been online before, scattered across several other websites, but with fewer years, in non-downloadable and non-shareable formats, locked behind paywalls, and/or with tools that couldn’t handle searching the quirks and oddities in the data very well. Well, now it’s all in one place, and we think we’ve got better data and better tools, and we’re here to tell you all about it!

ConnecticutGenealogy.org includes the first-ever online publication of Connecticut birth index data from 1897-1917, and this new data is the only statewide index of Connecticut births that exists publicly online anywhere. (Yay!) We also acquired marriage and death index data from 1897 through 2017, while the next most complete online version of the index only had data through 2012. And our search engine is set up to better handle some of the weirdness in this data, such as the official records from 1969-1979 only having the first five letters of each person’s given name, and some of the pre-1925 data missing some names entirely. Our search engine also has all the fun bells and whistles like automatic nickname and partial name searches, wildcard searches, automatic typo or letter transposition searches, date range searches (even down to the exact day, not just the year), and so on.

And we even geo-coded all the data, and we also auto-supplemented all the data with county names.

That means you can use this new website to do much more complicated things with this data, like search for every person named Elizabeth and no last name provided, and in any type of Connecticut record dated between July 13, 1902 and February 8, 1903, and within 25 miles of the town of Hamden — and get back hundreds of results that might help you find her, even if she was listed in the record as Eliza, Lizzie, Bessie, or Elise. You can even make queries like “show me all births in Town X or County Y in early August 1908” without specifying any name data at all which is so important when it comes to finding that elusive relative’s record, especially because we’ve discovered that over 100,000 of these records (particularly ones from pre-1925) are missing a given name, a surname, or both, often due to the original handwritten records’ illegibility.

And we even added graphs and maps, which update along with the search results! Because those are fun!

And we’re also publishing for the first time anywhere the Connecticut civil union database for 2005-2015. These unions were formally registered at the state level beginning in October 2005. Nearly all of these were automatically converted over to full state-recognized marriages in October 2010, then federally recognized in June 2015. Earlier records for domestic partnerships (which are legally distinct from civil unions, at least in Connecticut), were filed with some of the individual towns and cities in Connecticut dating back to circa 1993, or with religious institutions, but were not kept at the state level, and are not included in our database. Our huge thanks to genealogist and archivist Jeremy Berry-Cahn, who has been doing the first concerted project (that we know of) to catalog and acquire all domestic partnership and civil union genealogical datasets in the United States.

To obtain all this great data we (and Jeremy) submitted a few Connecticut state FOIA requests, made a few calls, and cut the state a few checks. The process for getting these indexes was almost entirely amicable, and did not require any litigation. However, we’ve also got a ridiculous situation dragging on in the state, to try to get more years of birth index data. More on that in a sec…

 

I found a name! But how do I get a copy of the actual certificate?

Well, the website gives more complete instructions, but let’s review them here briefly. To order a certified copy of a vital record, you can write to the state, meaning the Connecticut Department of Public Health, which has statewide records going back to 1896. But for shorter processing times, it is preferable to order directly from the town in which the event occurred. So if you know an event happened in Town X, you should probably try getting the record from the clerk of Town X, rather than asking the state and waiting a while.

Connecticut marriages and deaths are open records and may be obtained by anyone, while births and their associated indexes are currently closed for 100 years. There is no provision to request an uncertified copy of a vital record, but there is a very simple and very awesome workaround to get more recent birth records.

Ready? Okay. Any person who holds a membership in a genealogy society authorized to do business in Connecticut may present a card to a local or state clerk to obtain birth records within the closure period. See a list of those state-recognized societies, fourteen of them at the moment. So when making a request to a clerk, you should include a photocopy of your identification and your Connecticut genealogy society membership card with your mailed request.

Once more, with feeling: anyone can get any Connecticut marriage or death record, and if you belong to a recognized Connecticut genealogy society, and you have your physical membership card handy, you can get a copy of any Connecticut birth record, and you don’t have to wait a hundred years. (Gosh, if only more states were this amenable and sane about public records access…)

 

But now we come to the Kafkaesque nightmare, because of course

Acquiring all this index data from the state was relatively straightforward until we came to the question of getting more birth index data. We are currently battling with the state of Connecticut over this issue, although we are technically not in the court system…at least, not yet. And this ongoing fight has been the primary reason we did not announce this data earlier, as we had been hoping (and are still hoping!) to get a complete birth index to the present day. After all, if any Connecticut genealogy society member can get any actual Connecticut birth certificate from any year, then why can’t we get a basic birth index dataset from any year? What’s wrong with seeing just a list of names from 1940 or 1980 or 2010, if the full underlying records are essentially open?

Well. In August 2020, we made a Connecticut state FOIA request for the remaining unreleased birth index from the state, everything from January 1, 1918 to the present. As time has marched on, five and a half more years of these older records have since passed beyond the purported one hundred year restriction, so at the very least those 1918-1923 years of birth index data ought to be available to the public, nevermind the other 100+ years of more recent birth data.

Citing delays from covid, the Connecticut Department of Public Health (DPH) did not respond to our FOIA request until February 2021, at which point multiple follow-ups had already been made. And when they finally responded, the news was not good. They told us that index to births from less than 100 years ago could not be released, as they claim that there is a legal question about whether the provision restricting access to certified birth certificates, Conn. Gen. Stat. §7-51, extends to the basic name indexes as well. We think they’re wrong, but this is not an uncommon stance for a state to take when we fight with them, trying to apply legal restrictions that were only meant for actual record copies to the underlying basic finding aid or index.

But Connecticut’s response was worse than that. They also said that even the much older years of the state birth index, the ones from more than 100 years ago, could no longer be released to FOIA requestors, even though we already had the 1897-1917 section in hand (and now online) from a previous request. And the reason they gave was that all this state data is stored in a very very very old and rickety FoxPro database, and the one and only state staffer who was familiar with such an outdated data program had recently passed away. And she was the one who had previously helped give us the export of the 1897-1917 segment of the data.

In other words, Connecticut doesn’t want to give us, or anyone else, any recent birth index data, for reasons we think are both silly and incorrect, and they don’t even want to give us the indisputably very old birth index data because the state of Connecticut no longer has the technological knowledge to export parts of their own database, because their vital records database software is between 29 and 32 years old and their only employee who knew how to use it died. This is…not great. Not great for us as researchers, and frankly not great for the state itself, to potentially lose their own data to lock-in and obsolescence.

Naturally, we appealed this denial to the Connecticut Freedom of Information Commission (FOIC), whose purpose “is to administer and enforce the provisions of the Connecticut Freedom of Information Act, and to thereby ensure citizen access to the records and meetings of public agencies in the State of Connecticut.” They issue binding determinations in cases when members of the public believe they were wrongly denied public records. Similar quasi-judicial agencies exist in other states, such as Pennsylvania and New Jersey.

Again, citing covid, the FOIC was a bit slow to respond, but a hearing was set up for the fall of 2021, in which RTR and the DPH had to submit two rounds of briefs arguing their positions. We argued the two points that had been brought up in the initial denial: that the basic indexes were not restricted for 100 years, and that there was no real technological impediment to the DPH exporting the older records. Surely they could hire an outside consultant to help them convert, export, or otherwise re-engineer such an immensely important collection of state data? Worst case scenario, could they maybe, like, print it out?

Meanwhile, the DPH made a few brand new claims to the FOIC as well, such as a purported lack of any state birth indexes at all for some of the years. (We’re kind of not sure whether it would be better if they were telling the truth about this data hole or not.)

A lot of these disagreements about the meaning and intention of the law stem from very specific words and phrases that appear in the statute, sometimes as specific as the placement of modifiers. You may read all of the paperwork if you would like to understand the full case, as the issues we argue are complex, but we have summarized our main points below, excerpted directly from the filings:

“The Respondent [Connecticut Department of Public Health] claims that birth indexes created less than 100 years ago are unambiguously exempt from FOIA by selectively quoting § 7-51, leaving out the fact that this provision only applies to certified copies of birth records. § 7-51’s initial text is that “The department and registrars of vital statistics shall restrict access to and issuance of a certified copy of birth and fetal death records and certificates less than one hundred years old, to the following eligible parties…,” (emphasis added). Although they claim this unambiguously includes an uncertified birth index, instead this unambiguously precludes the birth index, as it need not be certified. This statute does not govern the release of uncertified indexes. […] The Respondent continues to discuss the legislative history of these provisions, stating that if the Legislature wanted to explicitly make birth indexes a public record, they could have. This is true, but also irrelevant. The purpose of FOIA is to make all records public by default.

The Respondent is relying on a definition of an index that does not match that which is in the dictionary. They claim that their database of who was born before 1948 is not an index, while that is the very definition of an index – it is a finding aid to an otherwise hard-to-navigate subject matter (in this case, sequentially-filed birth certificates). Although the law did not require them to keep an index until 1948, all records held by an agency are subject to FOIA, including those which are not required to be maintained by statute. […] There is no semantic difference between an internal reference list and an index. They could call it a turducken, but it’s still an index.

The Respondent provides another reason why they will not export data from 1917-1947. The reference list is contained on an archaic FoxPro database, and they claim that they are unable to manipulate the database because the staffer who was familiar with it recently passed away. Registrar Frugale testified that she was afraid that attempting to export the database could lead to the file being corrupted, but admitted this was not based upon any advice from any IT professionals. […] If there exist any copies of the Foxpro file anywhere, then there is no risk from manipulating the database, as any copy could be exported, with backups extant in case of issue. If the state does not currently have someone available on staff who is knowledgeable enough to work with FoxPro, then they can certainly hire a vendor to handle these tasks, just as their now-deceased staffer did in the recent past. […] While it is the preference of the Complainant to receive the file in a modern format such as a csv, to the extent that is impossible for the Respondent to do that, it would be acceptable to simply provide an exact copy of the database file, in the native Foxpro format, leaving the migration work to Complainant. […] In short, the Respondent’s technological incompetence is not a valid reason for them to withhold nonexempt records, especially when nearly identical records have in fact been provided to the same Complainant in the very recent past.

 

We filed the last brief in October 2021, and so our case has lingered before the FOIC for almost two years now, and we’re still waiting. When we inquired as to why there was such a long wait from a regulatory body, we had some more Kafkaesque fun: we learned that our FOIA case fell into a covid-related gravity well.

During the pandemic, the governor of Connecticut had apparently tolled the statutory deadlines by which the Commission had to adjudicate state FOIA requests. But when the deadlines resumed, the older requests made during that pandemic time period fell into a limbo, where the Commission had no legal obligation to respond by a certain time. The legal deadline applied only to all new and future complaints. Thus, the FOIC have responded to the complaints from 2022, but are basically ignoring the older ones, including ours from 2021. This is obviously not ideal, and we are now stuck twiddling our thumbs waiting for them to issue a decision. And so here we are launching this ConnecticutGenealogy.org website today with a birth index for 1897-1917 and no way to know if anyone will ever have access to any of the other years of the birth index ever again, nor any agreement about whether the state will ever bother to update or export their senescent FoxPro database that indexes state births, which they now also claim in their filings isn’t even an index at all.

On top of that, we have been fighting this case pro se, without lawyers. One of our intrepid directors, genealogy badass Alec Ferretti, has been handling all of the filings himself, going head-to-head with the State Registrar and the Attorney General’s Office, and we think, holding his own! We did not retain counsel for this project because, well, lawyers are expensive. But taking on these agencies without legal representation is never ideal, and if we ever want the state’s precious data to be online, or anywhere other than a very old and decrepit FoxPro database that not a single person on their own staff can use, then this is probably what we’re going to have to do.

And we can only do that with your help. If you like seeing records like these great Connecticut vital indexes go online for free, for everyone, forever, and you want to see us keep doing this kind of thing, and in more states nationwide, please consider making a donation to help fund our work. We really appreciate your support! You can donate on our website.

Thanks, and we hope you enjoy the new database! Happy searching!

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

Here’s how we did it.

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

To Whom It May Concern:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Okay, I found a name, now what?

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

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

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

 

So, who really freed these records?

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

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

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

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

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

 

Thank you

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

 

What’s Next?

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

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

Missouri does not have a basic genealogical birth index available to the public for any year after 1910. But in early 2016, Reclaim The Records discovered that Missouri’s state Vital Statistics law actually may allow for the publication of basic birth index data, even though they have not done so in the past. So in February 2016, we filed a request under the Missouri Sunshine Law to get that birth index released to the public:

Subject: Missouri Sunshine Law Request: Request for the Missouri birth index, 1910-2015

To Whom It May Concern:

Pursuant to the Missouri Sunshine Law and the Missouri Public Records Law, I am making a public records request.

Missouri’s statute concerning Vital Statistics states in Section 193.245.1:

“It shall be unlawful for any person to permit inspection of, or to disclose information contained in, vital records or to copy or issue a copy of all or part of any such record except as authorized by this law and by regulation or by order of a court of competent jurisdiction or in the following situations:

(1) A listing of persons who are born or who die on a particular date may be disclosed upon request, but no information from the record other than the name and the date of such birth or death shall be disclosed;”

(Online reference: http://www.moga.mo.gov/mostatutes/stathtml/19300002451.html)

Based on that statute, I would like to order such a listing, covering all persons born in the state of Missouri between January 1, 1910 and December 31, 2015, inclusive. Please note that this is a request for just the basic index to the births, and is not a request for any actual birth certificates. If it is possible, I ask that the Department of Health and Senior Services also include each person’s sex and birth certificate number as part of the data in the index.

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

In the event that there are fees, I would be grateful if you would inform me of the total charges in advance of fulfilling my request. I would prefer the request filled electronically, by e-mail attachment if available or CD-ROM if not.

Thank you in advance for your anticipated cooperation in this matter. I look forward to receiving your response to this request within 3 business days, as the statute requires.

Despite a three-day reply deadline under the Missouri Sunshine Law, the Missouri Department of Health and Senior Services didn’t actually follow up with us about this records request until late April 2016. They eventually confirmed to us that our request was lawful, and that we could receive the records we sought. They also confirmed that the data existed in database format.

They did let us know that while statewide vital records registration was supposed to have started in 1910, in reality there was only incomplete information in their database system until about 1920, and so our request might only be able to start in 1920, with possible scattered birth data for earlier years, for some areas of the state. We said okay and agreed to amend the years of our request.

However, we then ran into two problems with the agency:

1. A problem of format
   The Missouri Department of Health and Senior Services told us that even though the records we sought do exist in native database format, they wanted to provide the records to us in their “usual” format, which meant having one of their staff members request certain days of data from the database, print out the results onto paper, and then scan the paper into a compiled PDF format.Besides being a ridiculous waste of the agency’s time, money, and paper, this is also a clear violation of the Missouri Sunshine Law, which states that if records are already available in certain format (paper, microfilm, database, etc.), an agency must make copies of the records available in that same format.
2. A problem of calculating the actual costs
   The Department has apparently been using this birth and death data for years as a revenue source, charging researchers and scientists for access to birth and death index data by the day, rather than making all of the records open data. Therefore, the Department wanted to charge us not for the couple of hours of work required to do a one-time database dump to a USB drive, but rather charge us for each day of content we were requesting. Since we were asking for all Missouri birth index records from January 1, 1920 through December 31, 2015, they pretended that it would cost us $976,649.28 (23,376 hours at $41.78/hour). (In case you were wondering, 23,376 hours is more than two and a half years of work, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. It is also absurd.) This is also a clear violation of the Missouri Sunshine Law, which has found that an agency cannot charge by the record. See R.L. Polk & Co. v. Missouri Department of Revenue, 309 S.W.3d 881 (Mo. App. W.D. 2010).

At this point, in late June 2016, we sighed heavily and finally retained legal counsel, Bernie Rhodes of Lathrop & Gage, and we started conducting all of our communications with the Department through him. He talked to their General Counsel on the phone, who claimed to him that the Department’s IT staff simply could not do a single database dump as we asked, and would have to search each individual day’s worth of records, one by one. This, she said, was because they had a very old mainframe that ran “SAS” which could not handle a date range query. Very sorry, but just not possible.

We were dubious.

Reclaim The Records then, on our own, called up SAS’ tech support phone number and confirmed with their engineers that this was actually an extremely easy database query to do, which is just what we had suspected. We contacted the Department and let them know this. Additionally, our attorney pointed out to them that there were several reports and graphs on the Department’s own website that had clearly been created with this exact same type of simple date range query.

When confronted with this evidence, the Department’s General Counsel sent a new e-mail to our attorney on August 1, 2016. In it, she admitted the cost for the birth records query would actually be something like $3,008.16 — a huge discount on their previous price for the records.

But even that wasn’t fully accurate. To get to that $3k figure, the Department was still estimating the cost based on one search per year, rather than one single search to encompass multiple years of data. The General Counsel wrote that she would be seeking a clarification to reduce the estimate, if possible.

But then all of a sudden, on August 9, 2016, the Department sent out a new letter and, for the first time, declared that they would not produce the records and not comply with the Missouri Sunshine Law at all. They claimed that providing the information would be too invasive, and claimed to have the ability to withhold records at their discretion.

We wrote back a rather strongly worded response to that. We explained that this was not a legally defensible position for the Department to take. We cited caselaw.

And they ignored it and never responded to that latter, or to us, again.

So, on Wednesday, November 23, 2016, the day before Thanksgiving, we filed our Missouri Sunshine Law suit in the Circuit Court of Cole County, Missouri. We are asking for the records, at the actual cost of producing them, meaning with a single date range query, plus the cost of the USB stick. If they really need to bring in specialized IT contractor for a few hours to make all that happen, we would cover his costs, too.

But that’s not all. Missouri’s Sunshine Law allows for people making records requests to seek and receive reimbursement of their legal fees, if an agency wrongly withholds records, or denies providing them in an available format, or wrongly calculates the copying fees. So we’re asking for our attorneys fees.

And Missouri is also one of the rare states whose open records law allows for the possibility of fines if they purposely withhold records from the public, up to $5,000 per request. So we’re asking for fines too.

We’ve posted the relevant documents in the “Paperwork and Court Filings” tab on this page, ranging from letters to transcripts of depositions to affidavits to our motion for summary judgment. We hope you’ll enjoy reading them. More will be posted as they come in.

You can follow the progress of this request in realtime through Missouri Case.net, which is the Missouri court system tracking website, or by watching the MuckRock page.

SEE ALSO: Records Request #7 for the Missouri Death Index, 1968-2015

Reclaim The Records is excited to announce that, in coordination with the New Jersey State Archives in Trenton, we have acquired the microfilmed indices to approximately 445,000 vital records — births, marriages, and deaths — from the state of New Jersey. They’ve never been available to researchers outside of the Archives building before, and they’ve never been online on any websites, nor downloadable as open data.

And we’ve put them online! For free!

These records also represent (we think) the first publicly available index for any twentieth century vital records from New Jersey. The state has indexed a lot of its pre-1900 vital records, as well as some of its post-1900 non-vital records (such as lists of official name changes), and they have put those databases online for free searches. But they don’t have any of their post-1900 vital records available on any websites. They’re not in any of the major for-profit genealogical websites’ databases, and even everyone’s favorite large non-profit genealogical organization only has a selection of some birth and christening records and some limited county-level (not state-level) marriage records available post-1900, but that coverage is spotty.

So, yeah, this is big news.

The awesome, generous, amazing New Jersey State Archives has sent us copies of the following microfilms from their collection:

Record Type	Years	Approx. Number of Records
NJ Birth Index	1901-1903	100,000 birth records
NJ Marriage Index – by Groom’s name	1901-1903	44,000 marriage records
NJ Marriage Index – by Bride’s name	1901-1914	205,000 marriage records
NJ Death Index	1901-1903	96,000 death records
Total approximate number of records:		445,000 records

All of these new records being provided to us by the Archives are indices, not the actual certificates. But luckily ordering genealogical copies of the original certificates from them is easy, inexpensive, and unrestricted for these older records.

You might ask, how did you figure out approximately how many records there were? Well, a search of the web led to this document published by the State of New Jersey’s Center for Health Statistics, which compares the birth, marriage, and death rates in the state for the years 1900 and 2000. Assuming that the incidence of these events in 1901, 1902, and 1903 was not significantly different than it was in 1900, we just multiplied the 1900 numbers by three years and rounded up slightly, to account for the increasing population.

Note that the Brides Index goes all the way up to 1914, instead of stopping in 1903 like the other kinds of indices.

Who, What, Where, When, and How?!

So, you might be wondering: how did we get these records? Was it through another Freedom of Information request, filed under New Jersey’s version of the law, which they call OPRA (the New Jersey Open Public Records Act)?

Well, frankly, that was our original plan. Readers of our previous newsletter issue probably noticed that we had listed an OPRA challenge to acquire New Jersey vital records as our Records Request #5, all set to be filed in January 2016, along with many upcoming FOIL requests to various New York State and New York City agencies. (Those are still being planned, and coming soon…)

But in doing the research to figure out exactly which records to request, we had a long phone call with genealogist Michelle Tucker Chubenko. Michelle is president of the New Jersey Chapter of the Association of Professional Genealogists (NJ-APG) and she is extremely knowledgeable about the holdings of the New Jersey State Archives in Trenton, working there for client research several times a month. She was the one who told us about these indices.

The Archives holds microfilmed copies of New Jersey vital records up through the mid-twentieth century, as well as some original paper copies through the very early twentieth century. Researchers who are onsite are free to browse the records, but an index is only available for a very small number of those records, 1901-1903 and then sometimes starting again in the 1940’s. That means that for most of the post-1904 vital records, researchers have to sit there and browse through the actual certificates within each individual year. The certificates are usually arranged in alphabetical order by surname, but sometimes are filed in Soundex order, just to keep things interesting.

And to reiterate, none of this twentieth century material is available online at all.

Reclaim the Records thought this sounded like a pretty analogous situation to the case we won against the New York City Municipal Archives back in September: indices that are available for researchers to view onsite, but nowhere else. We decided that trying to acquire copies of this small number of existing indices for 1901-1903, while not as large a year range as we would have liked, sounded like a good test case for our first usage of New Jersey’s OPRA law. The indices were relatively self-contained on a few reels of film, they were indices rather than certificates (indices would probably be easier to win under FOIL or OPRA, and actual certificates are harder), and they were old enough that we wouldn’t have to worry about privacy restrictions. And so Reclaim The Records started making plans to find an OPRA-knowledgeable attorney in New Jersey.

But then something awesome happened.

Thanks to an introduction from the resourceful Michelle, the executive director of the New Jersey State Archives Joseph R. Klett agreed to speak to Reclaim The Records on a phone call. He is a very nice guy and, as it turns out, a serious genealogist. He had heard through the grapevine about our successful FOIL case against the NYC Municipal Archives, and our plans to put those records online for free use. But unlike NYC’s position, Mr. Klett was not denying us copies of the indices, and he thought the idea of putting these indices online for free public use was a great idea!

So, in this case, we didn’t need to file an OPRA request at all, no legal maneuvering or court cases whatsoever. In the end, the New Jersey State Archives flat out sold Reclaim The Records the twenty-nine vital records index microfilms for the low, low price of $35 each. They gave us free shipping, and even threw in some free alternate copies for three rolls where some records were too light or too dark.

And just when we thought it couldn’t get any better, they asked, oh, by the way, do you want copies of the 1901-1914 Brides Index too? You totally should index that data too. And we were like, uh, yeah, we’ll take it!

The whole process could not have been easier or more pleasant, and we are very thankful to Mr. Klett and the New Jersey State Archives for their decision.

Like a reel within a reel

This part won’t be as relevant once the data gets scanned and is eventually made searchable, but here’s the way the physical media is currently arranged:

NJ Birth Index:

• 1901: 4 reels
• 1902: 4 reels
• 1903: 1 reel

NJ Marriage Index – Grooms:

• 1901: 1 reel
• 1902: 1 reel (plus one extra copy scanned at a lighter setting)
• 1903: 1 reel (plus one extra copy scanned at a lighter setting)

NJ Marriage Index – Brides:

• 1901-1903: 2 reels
• 1904-1909: 6 reels
• 1910-1914: 6 reels

NJ Death Index:

• 1901: 1 reel (plus one extra copy scanned at a lighter setting)
• 1902: 1 reel
• 1903: 1 reel

Total: 29 reels of microfilm, plus three alternate reels. We’ll make sure that when these files eventually go online, links will be provided on the web pages that display the darker and lighter copies of the same reels, so researchers can easily switch back and forth to whichever reel has the better copy of the record they might need.

Wow. What’s next?

Our plan for these New Jersey indices is basically identical to our plan for the previously-acquired NYC marriage indices: put them online, for free, for everyone.

Sometime in the next few months, probably in very early 2016, the films will be digitally scanned and uploaded for free public access at the non-profit Internet Archive (archive.org).

Once that’s done, any non-profit organization, for-profit company, or individual researcher who wants to use the images of the indices is free to do so, for any purpose. You can download the entire set and re-post it on your own website, or print out the images and turn them into origami paper cranes, or whatever. There is no copyright on the data listed in the files (because the data compilation was created by the government), no copyrights on the newly-scanned images (because Reclaim The Records doesn’t believe in that sort of thing), and no usage restrictions on any of it.

COMING SOON.