FOI Requests

More than five million records from the Maryland State Archives covering more than a century, both the basic text indices and full vital records certificates 🤩 most of them never publicly available online before

More than 5.5 million genealogical records to search through...except for the ones the state still has locked up in an ancient FoxPro database they claim they can't use

Homegrown in the Garden State

"Release The Kraken!"

We want it all back.

That time we successfully appealed to a state Attorney General while waiting to board an international flight

One young genealogist's tenacity leads to thirty-one years of Mississippi state history finally going online

Remember that time the NYC DOH ignored ~6,000 public comments unanimously in opposition to their terrible records access rules?

The legislature now wants to lock away indices that have always been public. Nuh-uh.

Welcome to the single stupidest lawsuit we've ever had to file against a government agency

Why should these records be available if you're onsite at the state archives, but not available on the Internet?

When a veteran dies, why was the index to their veterans benefits claims file locked up forever behind a $300/year commercial website's paywall?

Almost 100,000,000 public records have been available only through a $300/year paywalled commercial website. We're gonna change that.

A new tool to find people born in New York City, especially if their birth records had spelling variants or poor handwriting

Frozen in a snowbank outside of Laramie? We got your record. Thrown off your wagon team in Cheyenne? We got your record too.

We acquired and published the first-ever data set of everyone married in the Garden State

"Out there, there's a world outside of Yonkers..."

These records were sitting on a hard drive in a city government's Inactive Records Center, not online for public use. We fixed that.

Corruption's such an old song that we can sing along in harmony, And nowhere is it stronger than in Albany

?All people and all families deserve to have their genealogical records available to them.

Wait, you mean we’re gonna have to sue the same city agency again? Over the same records set? After they lost to us last time?

Finally, New York researchers can ditch the microfiche sheets and join the twenty-first century.

NYS DOH gave us only half of the files we'd requested, and initially they didn't even explain why. So we sued them -- and won!

Historical voter data is often covered by Freedom of Information laws. We were the first to publish this often-overlooked resource online.

They tried to charge us $1.5 million for a public records request. Then they decided to ignore the state Sunshine Law altogether.

They tried to charge us $1.5 million for a public records request. Then they decided to ignore the state Sunshine Law altogether.

We acquired and published the first public twentieth century vital records indices for New Jersey.

They're more than 100 years old, but NYC won't let us see them.

It took us seventeen months of fighting with the government just to get a list of the names of dead people.

Yes, you can fight city hall — and win! Of course, it helps if the city refuses to return your e-mails and calls until you take them to court.

What do you do when a city archive won’t share its records with the public? Fight back. Read about our pilot project that started it all.