In at least one case where someone is a. Unfortunately, the Municipal Archives chose to ignore the Opinion, which meant we had to hire an attorney. Is this your ancestor? If one of the genealogical non-profit organizations or for-profit companies want to take that project on, thats entirely up to them. Read all about it! So as soon as we could, our attorney filed a new appeal for this second request. The data is totally in the public domain, and the important thing is that this information is now online, for free, for everyone. Edna Grace Olly (1892-1987) FamilySearch The New York State Committee on Open Government (COOG) wrote an Advisory Opinion about our FOIL request against the New York City Municipal Archives -- in our favor. Index to New York City Marriage Licenses, 1996-2017. This is great news, because it means for these forty-five years of data there wont need to be a new transcription project, since this is already transcribed and searchable! A lovely that has me excited for their hopeful legal victory. December 30, 2015: We formally submit our records request under the New York State FOIL. Of course, it helps if the city refuses to return your e-mails and calls until you take them to court. While the Department of Education does control those libraries, the state vital records microfiche there are still the property of the Department of Health, and are merely on long-term loan to the libraries. Then they decided to ignore the state Sunshine Law altogether. Read more about the known problems with the data. AND HERE THEY ARE! This is data that has never been publicly Reclaim The Records is an IRS-recognized 501(c)3 non-profit organization. Our EIN is 81-4985446. The index files created by the New York City Clerk's Office clearly had some problems with the quality of their data: Yes, in most states, a basic marriage license "log" or marriage license index is considered to be public information, even if the actual certificates or licenses may have strict privacy rules under the state's vital records laws. https://www.leagle.com/decision/1993506157misc2d3491455.xml, order a copy directly from the NYS DOH in Albany, David Rankin of the firm Beldock, Levine, and Hoffman, Initial FOIL response from the NYS DOH (February 15, 2018), First FOIL appeal for the state marriage index (April 9, 2018), Response from NYS DOH to our first FOIL appeal (April 24, 2018), Second FOIL appeal for the state marriage index (August 7, 2018), Response from NYS DOH to our second FOIL Appeal (August 9, 2018), FOIL suit (Article 78 petition) for state marriage index (August 24, 2018), Memorandum of Law from RTR (January 11, 2019), New York State Freedom of Information Law (FOIL), libguides.ctstatelibrary.org/hg/researcher/gensocieties, Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. This is a "born digital" database originally created by the New York City Clerk's Office. The records for 1881-1935 are online now, and the remaining records for 1936-1942 will be added within the next week or two. Fight back. We even cited the original 1993 Gannett Newspapers case that originally opened up the marriage license index in the state. Reclaim The Records is a non-profit organization and activist group that advocates for greater transparency and accessibility for genealogical, archival, and vital records in the United States. Through discussions with the attorneys at the New York State Committee on Open Government (COOG), I believe this basic statewide marriage index is legally available to the public under FOIL, based on the outcome of the 1993 lawsuit Gannett Co., Inc. v. City Clerks Office, City of Rochester [596 NYS2d 968 (1993)]. Another funny story: our Board Member had included the following line as her sign-off in that second request: For the record, if your office chooses to deny this FOIL request, this is absolutely going to turn into a lawsuit. Like, we literally told them exactly what was going to happen. New York City Marriage License Index 1908-1972. We hope to have more details about this soon. The option to schedule a virtual appointment for a Marriage License also remains available. The NYS DOH initially sent this letter saying that they had granted our FOIL request from September 2017, along with a hard drive full of the files we had asked for. We agree, but remind him that marriage indices are supposed to be open under New York State law, without a privacy barrier. How did this data get online? It was digitized from microfilm #29 from a set of 48 microfilms that covered records for 1908-1929. Billions of Digital Images and Associated Text Metadata Created Through the United States National Archives and Records Administrations Digitization Partnership Program, Social Security Applications and Claims Index. Yes, the for-profit genealogical companies will be also allowed to post these images to their own websites, if they want to do that. Contact us at [emailprotected]. ?All people and all families deserve to have their genealogical records available to them. ), Brooklyn (Kings County) Old Town Records, Welcome to the single stupidest lawsuit we've ever had to file against a government agency, Geographic Index to New York City Births, late 19th to early 20th centuries, A new tool to find people born in New York City, especially if their birth records had spelling variants or poor handwriting, Index to New York City domestic partnership records, 1993-2017. Nuh-uh. Reclaim The Records had already won records in this exact legal situation two times before, in two different lawsuits in New York City, where we successfully fought for copies of the citys 1930-1995 and 1996-2017 marriage index. When theyre done, the box of microfilms will be sent back to us, along with a portable hard drive holding all the newly-digitized images. Therefore, this FOIL request includes all years of the state marriage index up through 2016, and does not end merely when the publicly available microfiche production ended. Mildred Conlon. Did you find this information useful? Index to New York State Marriages (Outside of New York City), 1881-2017, Washington State Marriage, Divorce, and Death Indices, c. 1907-2017. April 7, 2016: Theyre due in court. what happened to it? New York, New York City Marriage Records, 1829-1938 February 23, 2016: The designated FOIL officer for the City Clerks Office, who is also their attorney, finally responds to our attorney, on the day the clock runs out on the appeal timeline. Furthermore, a set of these marriage index microfiche have also been made available by the Department of Health to the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) facility in Manhattan. Read more about the known problems with the data. Yes, non-profit groups and individual researchers can use and re-post these images too. #Genealogy #FamilyHistory. Be aware that there are, a new Freedom of Information records request, read the whole story, along with copies of the actual court filings, here, Read more about the many different kinds of New York City marriage records. Discover your ancestry - search Birth, Marriage and Death certificates, census records, immigration lists and other records - all in one family search! We really do hope that someone will turn the scanned images of this index into a transcribed and searchable database, to make life easier for researchers. FamilySearch. Because our attorney successfully combined the two requests, the original one for 1881-2016 and the revised one for 1968-2017, into one mega-lawsuit which we filed in the Supreme Court of New York, Albany on August 24, 2018. The Love Machine (film) - Wikipedia Newer files are still stored there, but some older files have been moved to the New York City Municipal Archives. The 1950-1995 and 1996-2017 portions of the index to New York City marriage licenses are now freely searchable online! The CSV file of the 1950-1995 searchable text database will also be uploaded to the Internet Archive. Anyway, long story short, we won our lawsuit on March 13, 2019. Some have a separate Brides Index and Grooms Index. Index to New York State Marriages (Outside of New York City), 1881-2017. NYC Marriage Index - Brooklyn 1963 : Reclaim The Records : Free You can read the request on its own page on MuckRock.com, and its also reproduced here: Pursuant to the New York State Freedom of Information Law (1977 N.Y. Laws ch. That data will also be released to the public, since it too should be in the public domain. Even though thats legally required, for every Freedom of Information request. This is a two-page document set originally issued by the New York City Health Department. If the state loses their appeal of our lawsuit, we will be able to get more recent years, through 2017, some of which may already be in text/database format rather than scanned images. In both cases, the agencies eventually conceded that the information was legally available under FOIL, and I received my records, and later published them. Frozen in a snowbank outside of Laramie? * This data was released to the public through a successful Freedom of Information request and lawsuit filed by Reclaim The Records, settled with the NYC Municipal Archives in September 2015. WE JUST PUT MILLIONS OF NEW RECORDS ONLINE, ALL FREEEEEEEE Introducing the Connecticut Genealogy Index! Heres the court filing. Statewide Marriage Records 1866-1937 New York, New York, Marriage Index Ancestry 1881-1967 New York State, Marriage Index Ancestry 1907-1995 New York City, Marriage License Indexes Ancestry 1908-1972 New York City Marriage License Index MyHeritage American Marriages Before 1699 Ancestry County Marriages of New York, 1847-1849; 1907-1936 Ancestry They tried to charge us $1.5 million for a public records request. See also the New York State Committee on Open Government (COOG)s published Advisory Opinions on Marriage Records and Matrimonial Records, some of which are available online on their public website: http://www.dos.ny.gov/coog/foil_listing/fm.html. New York City death certificates 1949-1968 and nullification of NYC DOH records access rules. WE JUST PUT MILLIONS OF NEW RECORDS ONLINE, ALL FREEEEEEEE Introducing the Connecticut Genealogy Index! We spend the next month wanting to shout the news from the rooftops, but unable to blab it publicly. a new New York FOIL request in September 2017, National Freedom of Information Coalition (NFOIC), New York State Committee on Open Government (COOG), SEARCHABLE TRANSCRIPTIONS (but not images) at. Thanks, FamilySearch! ?All people and all families deserve to have their genealogical records available to them. Wed put our odds at fifty-fifty. We have been informed that these microfilms are identical in format to the 1908-1929 marriage index microfilms we won from DORIS last year, which we put online for free public use back in April. READ ALL ABOUT IT: Thankful shout out to @ReclaimTheRecs today. What about people married in other years? Wait, you mean were gonna have to sue the same city agency again? You can read that letter online here. NYS DOH gave us only half of the files we'd requested, and initially they didn't even explain why. Because well be uploading so much data, well probably do at least some of this work onsite at their headquarters in San Francisco, where they have a ridiculously fast Internet connection. Humanity Against Itself The Retreat From Reason Please enter a start year and an end yearIf you fill in a start year, you need to fill in an end year too, and vice versa. Over the same records set? READ ALL ABOUT IT: Thankful shout out to @ReclaimTheRecs today. The document lists, if the bride or groom is divorced, And perhaps most importantly, this document usually has. Yeah, we did this Article 78 petition Voltron-style. Aug. 15, 2023. A copy of that decision may be found online at this URL: https://www.leagle.com/decision/1993506157misc2d3491455.xml. Yes, you can fight city hall and win! We fixed that. Finally, New York researchers can ditch the microfiche sheets and join the twenty-first century. We got your record. Read about our pilot project that started it all. . Using the New York State Freedom of Information Law (FOIL), Reclaim The Records won the first-ever public access to the 1930-1995 marriage index for New York City, over five million records. #Genealogy #FamilyHistory. Contact us at [emailprotected]. Joan Meyer, Longtime Editor of a Besieged Newspaper, Dies at 98 (But those of you who follow Reclaim the Records on Facebook already knew about our donation.) They're more than 100 years old, but NYC won't let us see them. Of course, it helps if the city refuses to return your e-mails and calls until you take them to court. This Petition sought to have a judge rule on the propriety of withholding these records from the public under the Freedom of Information Law, whereas a suit would be seeking damages. That time we successfully appealed to a state Attorney General while waiting to board an international flight, New Jersey Birth, Marriage, and Death Indices, 1901-1903 and 1901-1914. An index to eighty-five years of marriage records for a city like New York will likely contain millions of couples names; being able to separate out all the John Smiths by year of birth and/or country of birth and/or age at marriage would be crucial to researchers and genealogists hoping to use these records to search for individual relatives or to follow broader demographic trends in the data. Reclaim The Records first FOIL request, our pilot project, was an attempt to get access under the New York State Freedom of Information Law (FOIL) to the index to some old marriage documents that were stored only in the New York City Municipal Archives in lower Manhattan. Wyoming Marriage, Death, and Divorce Indices, 1900-1965. We filed a New York State Freedom of Information lawsuit, also known as an Article 78 Petition, against the New York State Department of Health (NYS DOH) in the Supreme Court of New York, Albany county, on August 24, 2018. Instead, we were trying to get public access to the index to a much lesser-known but very important record set. ), it may crash traditional spreadsheet programs like Microsoft Excel, so we realistically may need to wait for an online service to add it to their website, or for some group make a searchable front-end for the data.Yes, of course everyones favorite for-profit and non-profit genealogy websites are welcome to integrate this new database into their online offerings the data is in the public domain! When a veteran dies, why is their basic service data locked up forever behind a $300/year commercial website's paywall? For example, people whose surname was "McMann" or other names starting with "Mc" may have had their names listed in the database as "Mc Mann" (with a space after the "Mc"), which would make finding these records more difficult. The license sequence number alone could not be used, as it was only unique within each year and possibly within each borough, and we could not be sure there were any internal database constraints to ensure it was actually a unique field. It sounds like most of the US government, federal and state, didn't use any available tools to try to filter out even the most obvious identity fraud and grift of pandemic funds https://news.yahoo.com/trillion-dollar-grift-inside-greatest-131540731.html?guccounter=1 WAIT WHAT'S THIS https://twitter.com/ReclaimTheRecs/status/1265472968055853056, Why I love Reclaim the Records! The following is a very preliminary list of record sets that Reclaim The Records will be working to acquire over the next few years. We're gonna change that. Sister of Richard Frank Conlon. (More on that below. But NYS DOH apparently decided that they didnt want to abide by any of those previous court decisions or settlements.

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