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.

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!

Introducing the NEW JERSEY MARRIAGE INDEX, 1901-2016! These records are now totally digital, and totally free — forever! Now you can research anyone who got married in the Garden State right from your home, while still in your pajamas.

We’ve posted these images at our favorite online library, the Internet Archive (archive.org). You can skip right to any year you want and flip through all the images, or you can download the records to your hard drive as JPG’s, PDF’s, and/or other formats. Each file is listed year-by-year (or occasionally by a year range), and then the marriages are listed alphabetically by surname.

Just to be clear: these are images of the index, so this isn’t a real text-searchable marriage database just yet. But rest assured that the usual genealogy websites we all know are going to start indexing projects and will make that happen eventually. (Yes, the Internet Archive does run automatic OCR on the text contained in the images, but the recognition quality isn’t that great, so you’re probably better off just reading through the images instead of trying to text-search.)

Every year from 1901-2000 has a Brides Index, which means that the file is listed alphabetically by the bride’s surname or maiden name. Many (but not all!) years from 1901-2000 also have a Grooms Index, which is alphabetical by the groom’s surname. This means that most years, but not all years, have double coverage. For some reason, all the Brides Index data survived for all years, but the Grooms were not so lucky. Still, once this information eventually gets transcribed into a real database, this discrepancy won’t matter so much because almost every record lists both sets of names.

There are a small number of years in the mid-1930’s where the Grooms Index doesn’t exist anymore and the Brides Index had to be scanned from six microfilm rolls that we had to get from the New Jersey State Archives in Trenton. The awesome people at FamilySearch once again stepped up and graciously volunteered to digitally scan these six microfilms for us for free. Thank you, FamilySearch!

Finally, the 2001-2016 section of the New Jersey marriage index (oooooh, twenty-first century data!) was held in an actual state database, not just a four-generations-removed digitization of a microfilm of a dot-matrix print-out of an old database. We received the records for those years in PDF format, one file per year, but because the state had created those PDF’s by doing a print-to-file directly from their real database, you can do an actual text-search in those 2001-2016 files right now if you download those PDF’s to your computer. That’s good to remember, because these 2001-2016 files are not in any kind of alphabetical order at all, they’re just roughly chronological.

As you can see from the varied example images, these records are in multiple formats, with the data layout changing about once a decade. Some of the records give the exact dates of the marriage, some have the date the license was applied for, some have the month and the year but not the day, and some just have the year. Some of the records give the exact municipality of the marriage, some just give a county, some don’t list any locality at all, and some list a numeric locality code. To make things even more confusing, the state has used at least two different sets of locality codes over the years. Here’s a link to the old list of locality codes that were used between 1949 and 1984, which New Jersey genealogist Michelle Tucker Chubenko was able to dig up for everyone (thanks, Michelle!). And here’s the list with the the modern version of the locality codes, although we’re not 100% sure that this one started in 1985.

One more thing: this record set runs all the way up through 2016. That means that this is the very first public or genealogical marriage database anywhere that includes same-sex couples! We’ve looked around online, and we don’t see any other databases anywhere that include this, not on any website; Ancestry’s Vermont marriage database is probably the one that came closest, but even that one ends a year before their law changed.

In New Jersey, the government started legally recognizing same sex-marriages in September 2013. This means that if you’re using this marriage index for any point after late 2013, the header row that labels people as Bride or Groom is invalid; from that point forward, anybody could be Spouse #1 or Spouse #2, including opposite-sex couples who might have preferred to switch the order on the marriage license paperwork. The state apparently never updated the database field names, and did not add any new columns to record each spouse’s sex.

And one more thing to note about the 2001-2016 portion of the marriage index: that data spans across two pages, not just one. See that layout below?

Well that layout is missing four more columns of data, which are on the next page!

So do be careful to check at least one page ahead, too.

So, how did we get 115 years of New Jersey records? Well, in this case we all owe a huge debt to a mild-mannered genealogist who, probably much like you, was just totally fed up with the government wrongly withholding records from the public. But rather than just being frustrated, he decided to do something about it. This is a story about how one genealogist can make a difference.

Meet Alec Ferretti

He may look young, but Alec Ferretti been a serious genealogist for more than a decade. Alec is a graduate student at New York University’s Dual Degree Program with LIU, in which he is earning two Masters Degrees simultaneously, one in Archives and Public History, and one in Library Science. He’s a member of the Association of Professional Genealogists (APG) and recently won third place in their Young Professional Scholarship contest. In this photo, we catch a rare glimpse of the genealogist in his native environment amongst the microfilms at the NYC Municipal Archives.

Alec was inspired by our work at Reclaim The Records using Freedom of Information laws to force government archives and agencies to release copies of important archival documents back to the public. In fact, Alec was so inspired that he decided to launch his own public records requests!

He started looking around for states where the birth, marriage, and/or death index — just the basic index, not certificates — were not easily available to the public. Unfortunately, far too many states have some or all of these indices unavailable to researchers. Alec lives in New York, so he had started his search in the northeast and he quickly hit upon the issue of New Jersey’s marriage index.

Alec researched New Jersey’s state law OPRA, the Open Public Records Act, which is their state’s equivalent of New York’s FOIL, the Freedom of Information Law. He then researched New Jersey’s vital records laws, to see what they had to say about birth, marriage, and death records — and their indices. Most states have strict rules about who can access vital records (and when, and how, and how much it will cost per copy), but most states forgot to explicitly restrict the index or finding aid to those same records.

New Jersey is one of those states. Alec realized that while the actual text of the state vital records law seals the marriage certificates as private, it also directs the state to create an index to all marriages, for all counties that have a population more than five thousand people. Well, in New Jersey, every county has a population above five thousand people! And this law further uses the phrase “…which record shall be preserved as a public record” to refer to this index.

In other words, Alec had just figured out that the New Jersey marriage index was always supposed to have been a public record! You can read it for yourself in NJ Rev Stat § 26:8-44 (2013), otherwise known as New Jersey Revised Statutes, Title 26 – Health and Vital Statues: Section 26:8-44 – Indexing, tabulation and preservation of records by State registrar.

So Alec filed an OPRA request with the New Jersey Department of Health on April 26, 2017, asking for a copy of the index. But they denied his request.

So Alec turned to the New Jersey Government Records Council (the GRC) and asked them for an Advisory Opinion about the matter, which is a non-binding but very helpful ruling on some of the facts of the case. But in late May, the GRC told him they couldn’t provide a legal opinion one way or the other because there was essentially no previous case law about this issue for them to go on.

And that’s when Alec realized that he was going to need to bring in the big guns to launch Ferretti v. NJ Dep’t of Health — Office of Population Health, as a Denial of Access Complaint. This would essentially send the case to mediation, which is an option that some other states (including New York) don’t offer. But there was a catch: the backlog of cases meant that it might take up to a year before they heard his case, unless he wanted to file a motion in the New Jersey Supreme Court. Either way he was going to need help, both legally and financially.

And that’s where Reclaim The Records enters the story as something more than just an inspiration. Alec e-mailed us and told us what he’d done so far, and could we maybe help him? Could we set him up with an attorney for either mediation or help him move the case to court?

Well, of course, we said HECK YES we will help you reclaim those records!

So we set up phone calls with Alec, and phone calls with our attorneys. And amongst our Board of Directors we discussed the situation and decided to set aside money and time to fight for these records in mediation and in court, if need be. Alec informed the GRC he would move on to mediation, and the Department of Health agreed. They attempted to set a mediation date for late August or early September, 2017.

On July 11, 2017, the Deputy Attorney General of New Jersey, Angela Juneau-Bezer, took up the case on behalf of the state. This was a little bit intimidating, but we were still prepared to go to court if we had to. Those records were supposed to be open, after all, and we would fight for them. We’d already won the New York City marriage index last year; why shouldn’t New Jersey have an open index too?

But one week later, a small miracle happened. The Deputy Attorney General decided that there was no need to go to mediation after all. She would drop the state’s refusal and the New Jersey marriage index would be legally declared to be available to the public. She would instruct the Department of Health to put all the files on a small hard drive and send it to Alec in the mail, along with an invoice for the cost of the records and the drive. She thought the total costs might be about $675.

Now, that might sound like a lot of money, but really, a one-time charge to get about five million records and 115 years of data released to the public domain forever, plus avoiding all the costs of litigation? That sounded like a very good deal. Reclaim The Records made plans to reimburse Alec for the cost of these records, with his agreement that they would go online for free without any kind of usage restrictions, and we got our credit card ready.

And then? Another small miracle. New Jersey did something very un-Jersey-like and suddenly decided they wouldn’t charge a dime: not for the records, not for the labor, not for the hard drive, and not even for the shipping. They just gave us the data! We’d won everything and in the end it hadn’t cost us a thing — except for time and stress.

Why did they do this? We can only speculate, but it could be that New Jersey realized that they would lose the OPRA case, had we gone to the Supreme Court. New Jersey is one of only a handful of states where a requestor who wins an open records lawsuit will also automatically win payment of all their attorneys fees and court costs. This is unusual; in most other states, including New York, the decision whether to award attorneys fees is a totally separate question from whether the records were being wrongfully withheld from the public.

Alec sent us a copy of the data as soon as he received it. We started to put it all online at the Internet Archive.

And then we realized a few years were missing. The New Jersey Department of Health did not have a complete set of their own state marriage index! They were missing a number of the Grooms Index files for many years, and worse, they were missing the mid-1930’s entirely!

Luckily, we were able to figure out that the New Jersey State Archives in Trenton had copies of the missing years of data on microfilm. Alec reached out to their executive director Joseph Klett, who is himself a dedicated genealogist, and they agreed to make us copies of the six missing microfilms at the low low cost of $35 per film, which was incredibly nice of them. The similarly nice people at FamilySearch then agreed to scan the microfilms for us, and the six missing Brides Index microfilms went online a few months later in December 2017.

We also gave a heads-up e-mail to some friends in the genealogical community about the impending data release. (Special shout-out to all the people in the New Jersey genealogy Facebook groups who knew about this index going online two months ago but who didn’t spill the beans!) All the major websites you would hope or expect to see this data will have it online eventually, and multiple transcription projects are being planned, although it may take a year or two for everything to wind up freely text-searchable.

And as for Alec? Well, he seems to have been bit by the records requesting bug, and we’re working with him on some other new projects that we can’t talk about just yet, in new states. And you should probably tell him thank you for having the great idea to go after these New Jersey records in the first place. (Or you could hire him for your northeastern US genealogy projects, or Italian or Latin American or Jewish genealogy projects, or hire him as an archivist once he finishes his two masters’ degrees…)

One more fun fact: at one point in this records fight, a New Jersey government official casually mentioned to Alec that only a New Jersey state resident could file an OPRA request. This government official was slightly misinformed, as a new court case just this past April decided that OPRA requestors no longer need to prove in-state residency. Nevertheless, Alec was never a New Jersey resident at any point during this fight; he just conveniently didn’t volunteer that fact during the proceedings, and the state officials apparently didn’t think to ask him. We in the genealogical community are the beneficiaries of his forbearance. ?

One more way to say thank you

And there’s one more thing you can do before you rush out and start using the New Jersey marriage index.

We at Reclaim The Records were able to step in and work with Alec on this project because we finally became a real 501(c)(3) registered non-profit earlier this year, and have quietly been fundraising for the past few months. We’re planning to grow and expand, to target records access fights in more states, and to do that we needed to grow up from a little not-for-profit project into a real IRS-approved non-profit organization.

This also meant that we had enough funding to feel comfortable hiring an attorney and potentially launching a new lawsuit to help Alec fight for these records, and we knew we could also pay the state the $675 invoice for the marriage index. It was only by sheer luck that we did not need to pay out either of those associated costs in this particular case, because the state suddenly decided not to go to mediation or to court, and then they didn’t even charge us for the copies of the records.

We want to keep reclaiming and publishing records like this New Jersey marriage index. And we want to keep helping genealogists like Alec with legal assistance and financial support to reclaim any new records they may discover. If another genealogist comes to us tomorrow needing help with another awesome records project, we want to be able to say yes to them too.

So we hope you’ll consider supporting Reclaim The Records so that we can keep on doing things like this.

And we thank you for your support. ?

COMING SOON.

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.

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:

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.