We Want Our Records Back.

December 2024: Reclaim The Records announces another FOIA lawsuit win, this time a federal FOIA case against the VA, leading to the publication of BIRLS.org It’s possibly the largest public dataset of deceased US veterans, ever — more than eighteen million names, covering veterans who served from the late nineteenth century up through mid-2020. RTR builds and launches a new searchable database for the materials, but also builds a new free-FOIA-filing-by-fax system into the database’s search results, to enable people to get files from the government for their relatives and research interests. Learn more >>

November 2023: Reclaim The Records announces THE MARYLAND MOTHERLODE, an enormous collection — more than a century — of Maryland birth, marriage, death, and naturalization indices and vital certificates. Most of these records have never been available online anywhere before, or were previously only accessible within the Maryland State Archives building in Annapolis. We used the Maryland Public Information Act to acquire digital copies of these documents, more than five million records. Learn more >>

August 2023: Reclaim The Records publishes ConnecticutGenealogy.org, a new searchable website (totally free to use, of course) with the indices to more than 5.5 million of the Nutmeg State’s birth, marriage, death, and civil union records. We’re also still fighting with the Connecticut Department of Public Health for public access to millions of other years of their state birth index, currently locked away in a decades-old FoxPro database, which the state is attempting to claim as a novel kind of FOIA exemption. Learn more >>

March 2023: Reclaim The Records sues the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) under the Freedom of Information Act, for the second time in two years*. This time, it’s for the agency’s continued refusal to process eighty-nine separate FOIA requests made over a three year period about priceless historical records in the agency’s possession, and about the policies, procedures, manuals, vendor reports, budgets, e-mails, and calendar entries that would shed light on the agency’s activities with respect to these records. Learn more >>
* oh, and we won that earlier case, too 🙂

February 2022: Reclaim The Records sues the New York City Municipal Archives (yes, again), this time to reclaim and publish digital copies of every already-digitized historical document held by the agency, including all uncertified copies of historical NYC vital records. This lawsuit was undertaken in specific response to the city’s highly unusual new licensing and “permissions” rules, and their associated fees, concerning public use and re-use of their historical materials, even for non-profit or educational purposes. Learn more >>

May 2021: Reclaim The Records submits our lengthy public comment to the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), giving a very detailed overview of their agency’s failure to make historical immigration and naturalization files available to the public. We describe how the agency has been pushing all pre-1951 records requests into an unnecessarily expensive pathway for access that also subverts the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), while at the same time refusing to hand over many disclosable public materials to the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), in denial of their own agency’s accepted record retention schedules. Learn more >>

October 2020: Reclaim The Records takes on the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), asking for copies of hundreds of millions, and possibly billions, of historical records from the agency, both digital images and the text metadata that makes them searchable, which were originally created through their long-running public-private partnership program. These digital records were solely made available to commercial entities long after their exclusive “embargo” periods were over, but the files were never made freely available to the public by the agency, as had been promised for years. We’ve been told that this is possibly the single largest FOIA request, and soon to be FOIA lawsuit, in American history. 😳 Learn more >>

April 2020: Reclaim The Records won our Missouri Sunshine Law case! After four and half years of work, we won our case against the Missouri Department of Health and Senior Services (DHSS) to acquire and publish the first-ever free public copies of the Missouri statewide birth index and death index! We were also awarded our attorneys fees, and in an unusual move, we even won $12,000 in fines against the agency for four instances where they ‘knowingly and purposely’ violated the Sunshine Law. Read the judge’s ruling, and Learn more >>

April 2019: Reclaim The Records launches our ninth Freedom of Information lawsuit. It’s our biggest lawsuit ever. We’re taking on the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, Bureau of Vital Statistics, Board of Health, Commissioner of Health, City Registrar, and the former City Registrar. We’re fighting for the public’s right to access uncertified copies of ~1.6 million death certificates for New Yorkers who died between 1949-1968. These records would be open to the public if those deaths had occurred in any other county in New York State outside the city limits. And we’re also suing to overturn New York City’s recently-enacted and thoroughly awful rules restricting public access to historical records. Learn more >>

October 2018: Reclaim The Records launches our eighth Freedom of Information lawsuit. We’re taking on the New York City Municipal Archives to acquire and publish a portion of the Brooklyn (Kings county) “Old Town” records, approximately 143 microfilms worth of material from 1670-1898. These documents cover births, marriages, deaths — including for many enslaved people in New York! — as well as school records, tax records, military records, manumission papers, and more. They’ve never been online before. And yet the NYC Archives refused to make copies of these valuable records under the Freedom of Information Law. Learn more >>