Wait, you mean were gonna have to sue the same city agency again? Over the same records set? And we were all OH NO YOU DIDNT. No database exists (yet) for pre-1950 licenses, but the original handwritten ledgers were microfilmed. I can't find certain people in this database, but I know they were married in New York City between 1950 and 2017! This also means that there is some overlap between the microfilmed content and the text-searchable database content, so just for the 1950-1972 years of the marriage index, genealogists will be able to search for records in either format, scrolling through microfilmed images online and/or searching through the text database. Thanks, FamilySearch! We got your record too. This case will probably remain on appeal through the spring of 2020, possibly longer. Heres the court filing. In return, we are going to be cross-appealing, defending the publics right to the records and now asking the state for our attorneys fees, which may be awarded in FOIL suits. . In at least one case where someone is a. Note that this indexdoes not contain lists of marriages from New York City. Are you kidding us?! 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. Some surnames, compound surnames, and hyphenated surnames have inconsistent spacing and punctuation in them. And now, here's yet another purposely-kinda-vague slice of life report from FOIA-land. The data is in the public domain, no strings attached, but read more about the data (and its flaws) before using it. Marriage licenses less than fifty years old are open to the public only if both parties to the marriage are deceased and you can provide proof of their deaths, or if you are an attorney or legal representative of one of the parties. Index to Deaths in Yonkers, New York, c. 1870-1915, "Out there, there's a world outside of Yonkers", Index to New York State Births (Outside of New York City), 1881-1942. Here's what you should know. READ MORE. Historical voter data is often covered by Freedom of Information laws. 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. The year listed for certain people's license is wrong; the database lists the year before they were married? 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. #Genealogy #FamilyHistory. Reclaim The Records : Free Texts : Free Download, Borrow and Streaming 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.) Thrown off your wagon team in Cheyenne? So then we had to scramble to get someone from NYS DOH on the phone to explain where the heck the missing records were. It's free, public, open data. We acquired and published the first public twentieth century vital records indices for New Jersey. From Reclaim the Records. For several decades now, the earlier years of this marriage index have been available for free public use at a number of New York libraries, albeit in an old-fashioned microfiche format with availability limited by their locations and operating hours, as well as the deteriorating quality of the microfiche sheets. By April 15, 2016, 44 out of the 48 microfilms were online for free use, and the last four films went online shortly thereafter. Index to New York State Marriages (Outside of New - Reclaim The Records This data is in the public domain. Reclaim The Records vs. NYC City Clerk's Office - Petition, Reclaim The Records vs. NYC City Clerk's Office - Settlement, New York State Freedom of Information Law (FOIL), libguides.ctstatelibrary.org/hg/researcher/gensocieties, Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. They never informed us in writing that they were withholding any years or any types of data, nor did they provide any kind of legal rationale in writing even though thats all required in the states Freedom of Information Law, which requires a response mak[ing] such record available to the person requesting it, deny[ing] such request in writing or furnishing a written acknowledgement of the receipt of such request and a statement of the approximate datewhen such request shall be granted or denied.. NYC marriage license indexes, 1908-2018; NYC Marriage license index, 1950-1995; Others. 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. Over the same records set? We turned the six original .XLS spreadsheets into five very large and basically-cleaned-up .CSV files, one for each borough, all ready for people to use in applications, data analysis, or their own research. The spreadsheets lacked a primary or unique key or auto-incrementing field. They werent scanned, they werent online, they werent transcribed, and theyre not on FamilySearch microfilm. Furthermore, they were supposed to have told us in writing that they were withholding files, and also supposed to have told us why. Worse still, because there was a delay in discovering the missing years of data due to no written notice and a wrong mailing address for our hard drive, NYS DOH then decided that our appeal wasnt timely, because more than thirty days had elapsed. The legislature now wants to lock away indices that have always been public. The city was supposed to answer our case in court on Friday, September 25th, but instead they came to our attorneys on Monday, September 21st to work out a settlement, which was entirely in our favor. (Yes, all. This information is available to the public under FOIL under the following case: Gannett Co., Inc. v. City Clerks Office, City of Rochester, 596 NYS 2d 968, affirmed unanimously, 197 AD 2d 919 (1993). Fight back. But please let us know how you're using it, so we can link to your website or project, and show off all the cool stuff people have done with this open data. But NYS DOH apparently decided that they didnt want to abide by any of those previous court decisions or settlements. March 16, 2016: By now, theyve blown all their deadlines and were done waiting. Internet Archive: Digital Library of Free & Borrowable Books, Movies, Music & Wayback Machine. City Clerks Marriage Licenses, New York City, 19081937: One of 20th Century Genealogys Best Primary Sources, wrote this Advisory Opinion supporting the legal points of our case, https://archive.org/details/nycmarriageindex, Read COOG's Advisory Opinion in our favor, Our 'Thank You' letter from the New York State Library, New York City Department of Records and Information Services (DORIS), New York State Freedom of Information Law (FOIL), libguides.ctstatelibrary.org/hg/researcher/gensocieties, Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License, The document usually lists a more specific, The document lists both the bride and grooms. * 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. But then the New York State Department of Health refused to hand over the post-1965 marriage index! Almost 100,000,000 public records have been available only through a $300/year paywalled commercial website. List of Registered Voters in New York City for 1924. So as you can see, getting a copy of these records, in addition to the marriage certificates, is often beneficial to research. A tiny number of people in this database may have applied for and received a license from the City -- sometimes even more than once! Note that a marriage certificate is not the same thing as a marriage license! NYC Marriage Index - Brooklyn 1963 : Reclaim The Records : Free Their copy of this database also includes information about the bride's and groom's dates of birth, while this one does not, and perhaps they can do a look-up on those fields for you to help you track down a stubbornly missing record. New York City marriage records that are more than fifty years old are considered to be public documents, and all basic marriage index files are open to the public without any year restrictions. Why should these records be available if you're onsite at the state archives, but not available on the Internet? Index to Deaths in Albany, New York, 1880-1915, Corruption's such an old song that we can sing along in harmony, And nowhere is it stronger than in Albany, Index to Deaths in Buffalo, New York, 1852-1944. I look forward to receiving your response to this request within 5 business days, as the statute requires. This request is not being made for commercial purposes. We try to be nice, so we agree to the delay. Its not like our motives or our plans were some massive secret! ), 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. NYC Marriage Index : Free Texts : Free Download, Borrow and Streaming It is NOT a complete list of every couple who ever got married in New York City. They ask for another one month delay. In New York State,a marriage license which is more than 50 years old is considered to be open and available to the public. 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)]. Our EIN is 81-4985446. 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. These records were sitting on a hard drive in a city government's Inactive Records Center, not online for public use. We send out newsletters about once a month, but no spam. Our FOIL Appeal to the NYS DOH, arguing that we should have been given all years of the marriage index, because while actual marriage certificates and licenses have privacy protections, in New York the basic index or "log" does not. Read all about it! 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. Did you find this information useful? http://FamilySearch.org : 21 June 2023. To finally win these records in the settlement without enduring further legal hassles, we did have to compromise a little bit: The 110 microfilms and the USB drive with the CSV file have been mailed from the New York City Clerks Office to us in California, via UPS. Reclaim the Records. 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. New York City Birth Certificates, 1910-1917. Whomp whomp. Beneficiary Identification Records Locator Subsystem (BIRLS) Death File. AND HERE THEY ARE! Learn more about what we do. 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! I found certain people in this database, but I know they were not married in New York City between 1950 and 2017! Read about our pilot project that started it all. Meanwhile, well also be managing several other pending public records requests with several other agencies in at least two states, and more to be announced soon. Marriage Records Archives - Reclaim The Records The legislature now wants to lock away indices that have always been public. Index to New York City Marriage Licenses, 1996-2017. List of Registered Voters in New York City for 1924. Yes, you can fight city hall and win! Directed by Jack Haley Jr., it stars John Phillip Law, Dyan Cannon, Robert Ryan, Jackie Cooper and David Hemmings . Our attorney e-mails and calls the City Clerks Office several times. This may make it difficult to find people who "should" be in there. 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. 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. Explore genealogy for William Sachar born 1911 died 2007 New York County, New York, United States including parents + more in the free family tree community. Contact us at [emailprotected]. The requested records will be scanned and uploaded to the Internet, and will be made freely available to the general public. Index to New York State Deaths (Outside of New York City), 1880-1956. We say okay again, but seriously you guys, this is the last time, get your act together already. 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. Yes, you can fight city hall and win! and they finally provide us a draft invoice for the microfilm copies, and the draft stipulation and settlement papers. Mildred Conlon (1914-) | WikiTree FREE Family Tree 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. July 5, 2016: Theyre less than twenty-four hours out from their court date, and suddenly they scramble to contact us and finally settle. And then they ignored the Advisory Opinion from the New York State Committee on Open Government. Reclaim The Records - Wikipedia http://www.nycmarriageindex.com : 2016. Remember that time the NYC DOH ignored ~6,000 public comments unanimously in opposition to their terrible records access rules? We though this was a very fair request. They're more than 100 years old, but NYC won't let us see them. 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. January 14, 2016: We follow up by mail, asking for a response. where we recently sent the box of the 1908-1929 microfilms we won from last years lawsuit. (For the legal nerds out there, its Gannett Co., Inc. v. City Clerks Office, City of Rochester, 596 NYS 2d 968, affirmed unanimously, 197 AD 2d 919 (1993).) The other two films had to be retrieved from a different city vault for copying and they arrived in late January 2016. Index to New York City Marriage Licenses, 1930-1995 - Reclaim The Records Protestantism in the United States - Wikipedia We're gonna change that. The suffixes were unfortunately included in the surname column directly, not in their own column. And that means her FOIL request was constructively denied. Cant stop, wont stop. You can read the whole story, along with copies of the actual court filings, here. 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. When a veteran dies, why is their basic service data locked up forever behind a $300/year commercial website's paywall? Thank you in advance for your anticipated cooperation in this matter. We haven't sued this particular agency in a while, not since before the pandemic, and we didn't want them feeling neglected. New York Marriage Records - LDS Genealogy #genealogy, Just a note to say we sued New York City the other day, asking for a couple million more records, all twentieth and twenty-first century documents. Plot One night, a monkey is born from a stone atop a tall mountain and disturbs the Jade Emperor with rays of light emitting from his eyes. The group targets records it says are "wrongly restricted" by local governments. Index to New York State Marriages (Outside of New York City), 1881-2017 NYS DOH gave us only half of the files we'd requested, and initially they didn't even explain why. Historical voter data is often covered by Freedom of Information laws. Yes, you can fight city hall and win! 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.
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