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Family Tree Magazine Podcast
Understanding Reclaim the Records – An Interview with Brooke Schreier-Ganz and Alec Ferretti
00:43:30
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- [00:02]
A
Welcome to the Family Tree Magazine podcast. This is the show from America's number one genealogy magazine. I'm Andrew Cook, editor of Family Tree magazine. Many of the most important records for family history here in the US Are created by government entities. But some of those agencies are more cooperative than others when it comes to releasing records for public consumption, including for genealogical research. Reclaim the Records is a nonprofit that advocates for record releases not just with awareness, but with legal action when necessary. We've asked two members of the organization back to the podcast to share about what they do and what they're working on. Brooke Schreier Ganz is the founder and president of Reclaiming Records. And Alec Feretti is director of Government Agencies Worldwide. Welcome to the podcast, Brooke and Alec.
- [00:45]
B
Thanks.
- [00:45]
C
Thanks for having us.
- [00:47]
B
Thank you.
- [00:48]
A
So I teed you up a little bit there, but what, in your own words, is Reclaim the Records mission?
- [00:54]
C
Reclaim the Records is an advocacy group. We are made of genealogists, but also other people who use records in our daily work. It could be historians, journalists, researchers of all types. And what we do as an organization is to identify, acquire records that are held by government archives, government agencies, government libraries. We often do this through freedom of information requests and, if needed, lawsuits. Basically, we figure out what government agencies may have copies of records that would be very useful if they were made public, that ought to be public, that were usually funded with taxpayer money, don't really have any legal restrictions, but have in actual restriction on their use, either by forcing you to go to a specific location or not allowing anybody to see them at all in some cases. And we pry those records out of the government's hands and we put them back online for free for everyone to use.
- [01:47]
A
Yeah, that's a really succinct way of putting it. I'm sure. You know, as the founder, of course, you are deeply tied into the mission. What kind of records do you tend to focus on?
- [01:57]
C
We looked through a little of everything. We started originally with certain records that were only available if you were on site in certain locations. For example, if you were in a specific archive building and they were only on microfilm and you were allowed to see them, but you had to, you know, crank through them yourself. So in that case, it was often records that technically were available but not easily accessible and certainly weren't online and didn't seem to have any plan for going online. Over time, we have moved on to other types of records where no one had been allowed to see them. So they weren't just in archaic formats. They weren't just in specific physical locations. They were records that had, as far as we could tell, no real legal impediments, except that they just would not go online. And so we've moved on to things like state death indexes or marriage indexes or things where departments of health might still be holding on to material that had never been shared, or sometimes we've now gone after records that there is an older version, maybe online, but only behind a paywalled website, certain paywalled websites that many genealogists use all the time. But there was no free version available, even though it was public data created with our tax money about our families or our communities. So we've really branched out from just, I don't want to have to go fly across the country and use a microfilm reader to there's no reason this should be sitting in a government warehouse. Let's get this online and we'll make them put it online. If they say, no less of an
- [03:19]
A
accessibility issue than a bureaucracy issue anymore.
- [03:22]
C
Maybe it's been a combination.
- [03:24]
B
Yeah, we've really suffered from some mission creep in the last couple of years because there have been so many crises that have happened time after time that we keep trying to deal with. So, you know, as Brooke said, our real bread and butter was vital records indexes. But at the federal level, where there really aren't vital records, there's all kinds of federal agencies that are holding onto records that are incredibly old, that are, because they're not in the National Archives, very, very hard for genealogists to get. And we've pursued litigation against uscis, the State Department, the va, to varying degrees of success. The other thing we've started doing is not only identifying public records and requesting them, but actually trying to change the laws themselves, limited to only work in New York, but last year, the New York Health Department squirreled a budget proposal into the governor's budget that was going to basically close off access to vital records forever. It's more nuanced than that, but the short version was no vital records for us ever again. And we actually have been working with Legislative Council in Albany to not only kill that provision, which we did last year, but now actually change the law to make it more favorable to public access.
- [04:35]
C
Right. So we're not just using the laws at this point. We have moved on to even a step beyond that, which is we, what if we stop bad laws from coming in where we can, and what if we actually make better laws ourselves and try to get those passed? So we're Taking it more to the source of the problem, which is that a lot of these states and agencies just don't want to share. And while we can sue them one by one forever until the cows come home, what if we just fix the law in the first place?
- [05:00]
A
Sure, and those are ever shifting regulations too. I mean, there are 50 states. Everyone has sort of its own philosophy about what they will and won't release. What are some trends that you're seeing in that records access law? Are state legislatures and governments getting friendlier to opening records? Are they becoming more hostile?
- [05:19]
C
I'll let ALEC take this one.
- [05:21]
B
Well, I think there's two different questions here because the first question is for public records laws in general. So you know, FOIA, the Freedom Information act, was created back in the 1960s and every state has their own version of it. And there is a very large body of law about this and it's used by journalists and it's not a niche issue. And every state has strengthened their laws over the last 50 years. But I'd say that in the last decade or so there's definitely been a trend towards things just not working well on some level. It's just because use of FOIA has ballooned so much. There's all these data brokers that are trying to get data which is similar to what we do, and there's just journalists on all sides of the political spectrum just making thousands of FOIA requests. The federal government is inundated with requests, the states similarly. And a lot of state houses are trying to unburden government agencies, at least that's how they perceive it. And the way they unburden government agencies is by giving us less ability to get records or less effectively or more expensively or more complicated doing more exemptions. It's like New Jersey just closed off a lot of things in their Public Records Act. There were changes that happened in Indiana a couple years ago. The more relevant thing for genealogy though is the vital records laws, which is really separate from foia. Genealogists besides us really aren't using FOIA much, maybe at the federal level for certain records. The amount of times you're FOIAing a state level record as a genealogist is really few and far between. And the state vital records laws are where there's a much clearer trend towards closing things off. And it's really because it's a niche issue. So when the state does something like that, there's very few constituency involved. We are involved now and we're trying to change the messaging and everything. But until we dedicate lots of time or money to getting involved in this issue, there's really only one player in the game and that is the organization that actually is the lobbying firm for all the vital records health departments themselves called Napsis. And Brooke is of course having many thoughts as we, as I say this, but Napsis, they've been around for 100 years, but in their modern form they are the, you know, the membership organization for all the vital records jurisdictions and they try to standardize vital records management across the country and they do all kinds of things that we couldn't care less about, you know, or maybe we vaguely care in some sense, but like it's you know, gender markers and you know, electronic registration and you know, state sending data to each other and just like total all this technocratic stuff. But one of the things they do as part of all this standardization is trying to close off vital records access to the public while simultaneously having a product that they sell to corporations, government agencies where they can sell lookups of the exact same data. And yeah, because they're the government themselves saying we need to close this stuff off because it's the way to protect people's privacy. Legislators here, oh, we got to protect privacy. They're saying to protect privacy and they will make the statutes to close off access without really thinking much about it or the implications or what the actual information is in the first place. That's being potentially restricted until we start messaging in the opposite direction.
- [08:48]
C
Right. There's been a real trend by groups, especially by nafsis, but other groups too, to monetize public data. This is a larger issue than just genealogy and just vital records. There are groups out there and there are companies out there that don't want certain records to become widely freely available in ways that you could reshare or easily use or download or re upload or whatever. They on the one hand are saying things like privacy or this is our work product or things like that. And on the other hand they are selling these things over and over in their own online proprietary systems for lots of money. And that could be anything for some of the for profit companies that whose websites we all use all the time to groups like Napsis. As ALEC was just saying. Who on the one hand is saying we the government think these records should be closed. On the other hand, they as an organization are selling it not just to the US government, but to foreign governments, to commercial entities, to insurance companies, to catalog companies so that they can go through their list of catalog recipients and see who actually died in the past year. So they shouldn't get the J. Crew catalog again. I mean, they are speaking out of both sides of their mouth that these records are precious and valuable and amazing. The same time, they want to close off the access so that they can be the only ones who have the access, so that they can sell the access over and over, and we, the public, don't get the access. And we've seen this for the past few years ramping up. It's very frustrating, but we have, in some cases, been able to actually take the things that they're doing and beat them at their own game. There have been a couple cases, lawsuits, where we actually were able to quote members like the former executive director of Napsas being quoted. In one of our most recent lawsuits we won against New York State. We had a data set that we won from the U.S. department of Veterans affairs, the VA. And in that case, that was a record set. An older version had been given to Ancestry.com and they refused to give out a free version to the public. We've actually won that case and won a much more complete version of that data set because we said there had to be a free version. You've already released it at least once, an older version. So it is possible to push back against this commercialization of our data, our family status, our community's data. It is possible to do, but it takes time, and it takes money, and it takes vigilance. And that's where we step in. Because while genealogists are always going to be researching their own particular family, their own clients, things like that, there wasn't any overarching group that was doing this kind of activist work before we came along, not in a really sustained way. And so someone had to step in. And here we are.
- [11:15]
A
And I know your work, too. It doesn't just benefit genealogists. You kind of hinted at that, too. There are journalists who request these kinds of records, historians working on different projects. And another question I had, and you addressed this as well, is if you were to ask a government agency why aren't these records available? And the answer isn't just, well, we didn't think to digitize them. It sounds like sometimes it is not just privacy concerns, not just lack of funding. In fact, it might be this is a source of revenue for them, and they.
- [11:45]
C
They make money. There have been situations where they didn't want to kill the golden goose. In a case we had against Missouri Department of Health and Senior Services, in the course of our lawsuit, we got their rate Sheets where they were selling this data over and over to epidemiologists and to other people. And that money would go right back into their department's budget. And it was legitimately going to be an issue if they lost that revenue stream because some crazy genealogist sued them and put all the data online for free, which is what we do. So there's definitely been pure greed as a financial motive. There are certain archives we could name who claim that if you want to reuse or republish their materials, which are completely public materials created under some cases, defunct federal agencies 80 years ago, that you have to get their permission and maybe pay for the right to use it in your book or your product, which is bizarre and absolutely not what the law says. But they want that money flowing in. And so they will say, well, this is what we do. We are the repository for these materials and we're going to benefit financially from the fact that you have to come to us to use them. So flat out, greed is honestly one of the issues here. And part of it stems from the fact that many archives and many agencies are generally underfunded. And I do feel bad for some of the archives in particular, and they are looking for anything that can help their bottom line so they don't feel like they're constantly under pressure, having their entire budget slashed or their staff cut, things like that. So I do feel a little bad for them. But the issues with groups like Napsis that then, on the one hand are trying to change laws and sometimes succeeding at changing laws in certain jurisdictions, and on the other hand, turning around and selling that same data which they physically, they actually profit from, they have a deal with LexisNexis to create their databases and they split the profits. It's ridiculous and it's insulting to the public. And so we have to work hard to keep up with all the things that are happening or trying to happen and playing whack a mole trying to stop them.
- [13:35]
B
Yeah, the privacy issue is always complicated because, well, first of all, people, the average person has no idea what is and isn't private, which is. And like, you know, people assume that there is some degree of secrecy about their existence when there rarely is. And even if we ignore the data brokers that are selling private data, just things like your voter registration or that deed to your house or public records, and have been in many cases for a long time, you know, there's a common law right of access to land records and probate records going back centuries. And obviously all genealogists understand that, but people have this knee jerk reaction of wait, you know that I was born on February 18, 1995 in Oyster Bay, New York. That is really scary. And in New York that actually is not necessarily public record. So my voter registration is. So you get the date of birth, the place of birth we really could not figure out in the state unless we were to win a lawsuit for a birth index, which I don't think we would under the current laws. But in many states, such as where you guys are from, birth records are public and the average person has no idea if their state is an open birth record state or not. These are all open records and these I'd imagine the vast majority of people in the state have no idea that they're public records. They probably wouldn't like it if I told them that fact. But if I asked them to explain one concrete harm that ever possibly happened to them or anybody they've ever met, they could not do that. And we're kind of in that landscape where it gives people the ick factor and we're always combating that. And honestly, like someone saying, I don't want my birth record to be public, I don't view as an unhinged take as much as I wish we'd open records in New York and I sacrificed mine being public in exchange for that. I understand it. But the problem is that these health departments take it to a logical extreme where not only do they want to have living people's identity documents be restricted, but records about people who've been dead for decades, if not more than a hundred years have to also be restricted. And frankly, do not view genealogy or history or public access as part of their work. They are a health department and their job is medical and health. And they come from the perspective of medical stuff is private and sacro sect and like we are a constituency that doesn't matter.
- [15:52]
C
Right. And so sometimes we have to push back on that in certain lawsuits with say an affidavit saying, you, health department have said in your public messaging that it is important for people to know their family health histories. Well, one of the ways you know your family health history and your predispositions to cancer or other issues is that you have access to a family tree where you know the risks and what side of the family certain things might run on. And in order to do that, maybe it would be better if you didn't restrict death certificates in New York City for 75 years for someone who's literally already dead. It they're not going to get More dead. If a piece of paper is available to a relative, you know, there's. There's talking out of both sides of their mouths. Again, it's ridiculous that some places take it, like, as an absolute obvious thing, like, oh, God, it would be terrible. Someone saw my birth certificate. Be terrible if someone had access to a death certificate five years after her death. And in other parts of the country with millions of people, it's always been like that. It's always been open, the sky didn't fall, everything's fine. And it absolutely helps people in many multiple ways that the quote unquote privacy issue is really not helping at all.
- [16:55]
A
And to back up a little bit for our listeners who maybe aren't quite as up on what these different access laws are, as you hinted towards, the Department of Health in each state is usually tasked with the more recent birth, marriage and death records. And they vary state by state. But some places will gate records going back, you know, records created less. Birth records created less than 100 years ago are private. You have to be a direct family member, whatever.
- [17:25]
C
Zero years, you know, like there's such a range. And every place thinks the way that they do it is the normal. Correct. Obviously.
- [17:32]
B
Right.
- [17:33]
C
One, but that's not necessarily true. And in many other countries, it is much more lenient for access rights or at least for basic information access rights than it is in certain states, which is crazy.
- [17:43]
A
Yeah. And so once you've successfully lobbied to have a group of records released or you've won a lawsuit for the release, how do those records become public? You said that you make them free. But do you host the images and scan them or are they. Do you partner with somebody? How does that work?
- [18:01]
C
Well, if you look at things that it depends how who we're dealing with in order to get the record. And I should say we don't always need to have a lawsuit some places you just need to have a knowledge of that state law or the federal law, FOIA if you need to. And to maybe have it on an attorney's letterhead and to show an organization or an agency, hey, you're actually going to have to say yes to us. This isn't under your discretion at all. So to use an example in Maryland, the Maryland State Archives has phenomenal stuff with a very small embargo, period, you know, especially for deaths and for marriage records in Maryland. But you could only see them if you were on site in Annapolis at using their machines, you know, cranking their microfilms. Some were digitized, some were not in that Case we had someone who is an intern for us, a PhD student, be able to talk to them and work on a project for a long time, saying, actually you have to digitize all the ones that aren't done yet. You have to give it to all me on, on hard drives. We will pay you for the hard drives, we'll pay for shipping. You know, it's. We're not trying to get something for nothing. But if you already have the records, we would like to have the copies too. And we'll pay for the access. And once we have our copies, what we generally do of whatever kind of records they are, be they digital records, be they images, PDFs, CSV files, which comma separated value text files, database files, we generally upload them to the Internet Archive, which is a separate nonprofit, an awesome one based here in San Francisco. Archive.org it is not Archives.gov, which is the National Archives, NARA Archives.org and the reason we use them is they're dedicated to making data freely available and they don't charge us for the hard drive space. So we tend to upload there. But then we put all the pointers from our website to where the actual files are stored. We as an organization generally do not get involved with doing indexing, transcription, things like that. We basically want to work on identifying the records, acquiring them, putting them online, telling everyone what we just did, and they will figure out how to either put it on their own commercial or free website, maybe make their own transcriptions of some are part of them, whatever they want to do, fine by us. And then we move on to the next project.
- [20:11]
A
And you mentioned there anybody who wants to index them, et cetera. How do the big genealogy websites fit into this process?
- [20:19]
C
It's up to them, honestly. We let everybody know through our email, our newsletter what's been going on, and we're like, hey, look, new records. They're online, they're free. Go have fun. Sometimes they are just, just the way that we got them is the way that they were stored at the archive or the agency. There have been cases sometimes where we get digital data files in more recent years and we build our own front end website to make it super searchable. Like we make these little individual mini websites such as newyorkdeathindex.com or other, many other websites we've made where the data files are still freely available, linkable, downloadable, reusable. If you just want some raw data on your own machine, you don't want to use a front end at all. If you Want to republish it? That's great. But we also build our own front end website so that people can just easily type in someone's name like, oh, that guy, Uncle Joe died in 1960 in Poughkeepsie, you know, so you can use it more easily, more quickly.
- [21:12]
A
And can you tell us about what your latest project is, assuming that you're not bound by non disclosure agreements or active lawsuits?
- [21:21]
C
We are perpetually like juggling 10 balls at the same time and we perpetually have a backlog on our Dropbox, which is enormous, but we're working on that. Probably the next big thing we'll be announcing is a bunch of Massachusetts records going online and usable. ALEC can tell more about that. Some of them we were able to acquire, no lawsuit needed. Some of them we were able to acquire very easily because we have contacts, friendly contacts in some Massachusetts organizations. But some of them, ALEC had to have two years of back and forth considerably angry emails with certain people to get certain records. Even though we think we might have more. You know, it's a mix of things that would be Massachusetts births, marriages, deaths, name changes, a couple other things. But ALEC can tell you more.
- [22:01]
B
Yeah, so Massachusetts is one of these open record states, which is why it should be easy to get lots of things. But of course it's never that simple. So the vital records indexes have been largely online for the 20th century on Ancestry or various places. But there were a bunch of gaps and they kind of ended in the 1960s or so and there were just like random volumes that never got scanned. So I think they, I think what ancestry has came from any HCs and their books were just haphazard from what they collect throughout the years. So anyway, I went after the registry of vital records for the full run. So they have vital records starting in 1930 or so. I think they should just transfer the early 30s to the state archives. But when I did this, it started 1930. So I got the indexes from 1930 through like the 80s or so for the birth, marriages and deaths. Potentially more exciting is records of like name changes and amendments and delayed things where we've also obtained some which again there was like one or two volumes that might have been online buried in familysearch. But we're getting the full set now and putting everything together. I've also been working with a fun project in Massachusetts where I've pitted the supervisor of public records against the health department because the supervisor of public records has basically taken the position that images of vital records themselves are public records. Subject to the same access provisions, Whereas the super, the health department is saying they're only available as certified copies and you have to pay a fee. And these two agencies are kind of at war with each other in this proxy battle that I kind of caused. And there's really no. There's no solution. Right now. The health department is sticking firm and instructing Towns to not fulfill my requests. But it is potentially going to happen at some point soon where there's an agreement that a scan of a marriage license in Massachusetts is record like everything else, and all of a sudden informational copies will be available to all genealogists for free, which is my eventual goal with this project.
- [23:57]
A
And that's another thing that you'll run into is you can you have access to certain data from a vital record event, but only an informational copy, like you said, or they'll give you a death record, but strip out the cause of death or the Social Security number, that kind of thing.
- [24:13]
C
And it's all they will choose. Agencies and also judges, frankly, will choose entirely random pieces of data. They think, oh, that's horrible if that got out there. And in the case of our New York State death index win. The one field that was explicit, one that was originally explicitly denied to us, is something that's already public from the federal government, which is the Social Security number field. And we explained all in our papers, by the way, Social Security numbers of deceased people are never reused. In fact, they're purposely published so that it will deter fraud. You can't reuse a dead person's number to open a new bank account, things like that. So we were explaining in our paperwork, like Social Security numbers, if you're dead, are not only fine to release, but are routinely released and have been for decades. And that started because of a FOIA case many, many years ago. Well, we won our New York state records case. And yet they said the one field that you absolutely cannot release is a Social Security debt number, the security number. So in some cases like that, we just don't fight it. It's like, all right, you're wrong. And we could go into a lot more detail about why you're wrong. And actually we did, if you had read. But we're not going to fight on that because we're getting all this other new data. And if you want to continue being wrong about that one field, we'll take it if we're going to get all these other fields.
- [25:22]
A
It's the ick factor you mentioned because, well, my Social Security number is private so shouldn't I keep my great grandfather? Well, my great grandfather, but shouldn't I keep my ancestors Social Security number private too?
- [25:35]
B
It's hilarious. I always love seeing people on social media. They'll like post an image about it, they'll have a question about their ancestor and they'll post the record from Ancestry and they'll redact their great grandfather's name and date of birth off his marriage license. That is available online about someone who died 80 years ago. And it's just this knee jerk reaction was like, I thought I was supposed to protect my data. I'm like, protect what from whom? And how is that even, even if my goal was to steal his identity, I would just go on Ancestry and get the record.
- [26:06]
A
And you know, not to be a conspiracy theorist either.
- [26:08]
B
Right.
- [26:09]
A
But there are plenty of other ways that our data is being harvested without our consent. And you know, maybe that's where people should be channeling their.
- [26:17]
C
Yeah, no, that's absolutely right. There are so many worse things going on in terms of buying and selling data while at the same time, you know, closing it off through public channels. That is so much more egregious and so much more worrisome than historical documents that are open in some parts of the country and not open other parts of the country. That's. People are really looking at the wrong things. And frankly, a lot of the issue is that a lot of genealogists don't have any appetite for a fight of any sort. They tend to be older people, they tend to do this when they have more time available. They tend to be somewhat introverted. I can sympathize. They tend to want to do things online. They want to, if they meet up with their friends for a genealogy talk, sit with them and have coffee cake afterwards and maybe talk about grandma. And all of that's lovely. But that's all there was for a long time. There was no one doing the lookout and the work and the. I think I want to sue the government for fun and this is going to be my job for 10 years. Like, no one had the appetite really for fighting back, for tracking to a large degree, for maybe there were some people who were interested in tracking or complaining about it or telling people online. Isn't this terrible? We should write a letter. We should write lots of letters. But there wasn't actual pushback in a concrete way. And that's the most important thing, is not just to complain about it, it's not just to notice it, but to actually fight. And that means fighting back when it happens, fighting for records access, fighting to push back against bad law changes, fighting to actually implement new laws that benefit all of us. That's something I'm really proud that we've been doing because Reclaim the Records has been doing this on a shoestring budget for 10 years. And everyone else who does anything like this in the space is either the older introvert who doesn't necessarily want to get their hands dirty, or they're a corporation. Those are really kind of your two options here. And neither one was really doing the kind of work that we needed.
- [28:12]
A
And I think there's an expertise gap too, right? Not just a willingness, it's people don't know how to navigate the laws. They don't know how to get in touch with an archive in this way or a government.
- [28:23]
C
Not expertise, though. I don't think it is. It's sort of. We had to learn as we went. The more important base issue is are you willing to fight or not? That is the more important base thing. Are you an organization that is willing to fight or are you going to just have coffee cake? Are you a person who is okay suing New York City or are you not? That's the base issue. I didn't know what I was doing when I started. Alec didn't know what he was doing. We all figured it out as we went. We've made mistakes, mistakes, then we learn from those mistakes. But if you don't have the impetus to actually do something about it, then it doesn't matter whether you're educated or not and how.
- [29:00]
B
Like we've been doing this for 10 years now and we know more about FOIA than most attorneys probably do. Not FOIA attorneys, but random attorney off the street. We know more about FOIA than they do because it's not their specialty. But you don't. I remember, you know, my first FOIL request was modeled after Brooks first FOIL request, which was I'd imagine she made by googling. Did you even know what FOIL was when you started this?
- [29:25]
C
I started out with this very long, I think it was like five page Freedom of Information law because it was a state law in New York request. And I was still under the naive belief that if I explained things really well to the New York City Municipal Archives and gave support supporting evidence and explained to them if they gave me a copy of the index, they would get more orders, that they would actually make money in the long term by fulfilling those orders and everyone would benefit and we would hold hands. And I was still under this very naive belief that you can reason and you can make a really good faith argument and people would be reasonable. And I have since learned that that was not going to happen in most cases. There are certainly some archives that are great to work with. There are some agencies that are very good to work with. But honestly, the thing that fixes things is your ability to follow through and sue. And genealogists don't want to hear that word. But that is the truth. What happens that makes these things and these records come available to you is because you are really, really willing to sue. That's it.
- [30:29]
A
Knowing that our. Well, let me split that over. How would you suggest if someone's listening to this podcast now and is really fired up, they want to, they've been converted, they want to roll their sleeves up and fight the good fight here. How can they be good advocates for open records?
- [30:47]
B
I would say they watch some of my webinars and you know, Brooke has given webinars about Reclaim the records. I don't think you've ever given webinars about FOIA as like a, like, like instructional.
- [30:58]
C
No, usually I'm like, here's how we got this record set, here's how you get these veterans records, here's how you got these New York records or whatever. So it's sort of like retrospective of a particular case or particular record set.
- [31:08]
B
But I have for years now given actual webinars about advocacy as like, you know, strategic. This is what you do. And the easiest place to start is to find my webinars and watch them. I've done some for Legacy Family tree webinars, I've done some for apg. I don't know if there's any that are not behind some sort of a paywall, to be honest, which is a bit ironic. But you know, I. There are talks on the Internet that you. That can be found that I'm talking about. This is how FOIA works and also this is how advocacy works. And as much as I say you can start with no information because I've made webinars about genealogy advocacy and FOIA. You probably watch the 45 minute video first, but once you have that, you know, that puts you years ahead of where we started, honestly. And you know, I think the biggest problem is that everybody always is angry, but people don't understand what they're angry about. Like, you know, the first thing to always triage is are you mad at a law that is not being followed or are you mad at a law that you wish didn't exist? And that is like Step one. And the vast majority of people who come to us say this law is terrible, sue somebody. And that's not how it works. I mean, you could try to make a case that it's unconstitutional. Like you could technically have a fun law school debate about it. But like, if there's a law, you need to change the law and that means you need to lobby. Whereas if there's a government not following the law, you need to either sue them or get someone who is in charge of that person to make them comply. And we dabble in both. Obviously the suing and following the laws are real bread and butter. And like, even from there, like the next step is why aren't they following the law? And you know, we talked about this earlier about is it a money thing, is it a privacy thing, is it just a bureaucratic thing? But you need to have an understanding of what is happening behind the scenes, which often requires making more FOIA requests. But once you have that understanding, it it really puts you in a position where you can understand what can be done. And I'm actually working on a webinar that I've not given yet because it has not been created fully. But it is not just the, like, this is how FOIA works, but these are the kinds of fun operational records about the government that I FOIA to learn about how they do things, to then tee up litigation for actual genealogical data sets. And that is the knowledge gap that basically everybody who's not us has because I'm always requesting people's calendars and meeting notes and emails and all this kind of dirt. And I mean, journalists use foia, so there are resources online, they're just not for genealogists. But yeah, so it is a multi step process.
- [34:02]
C
Right. So let's give a specific example of how that works because Alec Ferretti and Alex Kalzerith, who's not here right now, are two of the best at getting the stuff around the thing you want, which will come into play in a later lawsuit. So concrete example, our New York State death index lawsuit, which took four years, which we won. Yay. Which is online, which we're trying to get a couple more fields from, to wrap up. But you know, it basically New York State now has a death index through the end of 2017. We're hoping to have many more years on soon. We're hoping to get more New York City records soon. We're hoping to get a couple more fields. But we won that case at the highest court in New York after four years before that case was ever just a Freedom of Information request. There were lots of other Freedom of Information requests going on to understand the landscape. So Alec and Alex were both instrumental in making this happen, and they were so useful in the court of case. In the case, for example, getting the emails of the New York State Department of Health asking for their emails, asking for them by email box. And we had to know their organizational charts that we could provide, which boxes to search. Because many years ago, I had an issue in New York State where I just asked for everybody in a certain department and lost that one because they said it wasn't specific enough. And then later on, we figure out how to get all of them anyway, just by knowing the names. One of the things that they requested was the Outlook calendars of certain people in the New York State Department of Health. You can get an Outlook calendar, they can do an export as a PDF. And by reading through calendar entries day by day by day, they were able to look through certain things. One of which mentioned a bomb shelter in Albany where they were going to look at the originals. Apparently that's where you store the original death records in New York State. And by going through some of the other things about how they had meetings with vendors and the vendor reports about which items had been digitized and which ones had not, which ones were starting to be transcribed, which ones had not. There were FOIA requests, foil requests, about the front of the cabinets in the bomb shelter, the little things, the listings of what was in each cabinet, all these things that they were able to help put together that weren't the exact thing we were asking for. We wanted the death index, but that helped fill in what's going on with this department. How are the records stored? How are they being digitized? What does the contract say? The contracts are public in New York. All these other requests that were sort of ancillary. Absolutely came into play when we went for the big fish, which is, I want your death index. And they tried to claim to us they didn't have a death index, things like that, which, of course, no one got in trouble in New York State for that. No one got in trouble for saying to the court, we don't have a death index. We have some genealogical index online that goes through, like, 1957 to 1960, whatever, 1970, whatever. But we don't have an index for all these years. And so we were able to pull up other things and use them in the lawsuit. Like, no, you absolutely have an index. You've been working on it. You've been Spending public money on it. Do you remember this now? You know, things like that.
- [36:52]
B
So not the most fun part that I had foiled was all of the records of the Department of Health for their vital records fraud monitoring. Because when we do all of this, you know, argument number one is we have to prevent fraud. Vital records fraud is scary. If somebody knows that Grandpa died 1937, they could commit fraud. So I asked the Department of Health for all the records of the fraud, fraud. They've identified steps taken to prevent fraud. You know, all the fraud, fraud, fraud, whatever. They came back, we have no records. I appeal that to the general counsel's office. We affirm there's no records about fraud. So we then put that in our lawsuit saying, well, it's funny, they're claiming that all these fraud problems because it turns out they've expended literally zero resources ever in monitoring vital records fraud. And the Court of appeals did have a couple of lines in the decision referencing how that was in harder. You know, obviously along with everything else persuasive into why the privacy was not really a valid concern here. So quite literally, even the absence of records really helped us.
- [38:01]
C
Right.
- [38:02]
A
Understand otherwise. Not just the records you're trying to look for, but also the infrastructure around it, the processes around it, the
- [38:13]
B
sort
- [38:14]
A
of different competing priorities and restrictions.
- [38:18]
C
Yeah, we had this in several cases where you have to go through and read their emails. Like you can do that. You can request them through separate requests, as happened here, or sometimes after you've done your, your lawsuit, you can start doing stuff in discovery. But that takes a while. It's fun to read their emails about us and what they say about us behind our backs. If they think no one's ever going to see. Of course we see them. Of course we see how they're referring to our organization, to us individually. I get referred to by my initials by a department. I mean, like they don't like us very much. And that's great because we win.
- [38:49]
A
God bless America. We can make these requests and bring all this information to light.
- [38:56]
C
We are very lucky to live in a country that has these sorts of laws available both at the state level and at the federal level. We are very lucky that we have this sort of system put in place. It is very important that you use these laws because you are able to use these laws because we have them and we should make use of them in a time when sometimes having access to materials that are about things happening in government agencies large and small is not always the easiest to obtain. And also it's fun to then eventually read what you turn up.
- [39:28]
A
Well, and how can our listeners support Reclaim the Records? Specifically, of course, we'll link to your website and the database that you've mentioned of New York death indexes.
- [39:37]
C
Yeah, we have records from all over the country. Not every state yet, but, you know, someday maybe, and certain federal agencies. But if you want to stay on top of what new things we're working on. We're working on new things all the time. Go to reclaimtherecords.org, that is plural, reclaimtherecords.org or to any of our mini websites which also link back to that. It tells you what we're working on, how we're doing, and most importantly, you should sign up for our newsletter. On all our various sites, our main site and our little mini sites, there's just a newsletter. Sign up. Every once in a while we tell people what we're working on. We also take suggestions by email or by form. If you know about a specific record set in your corner of the country or your corner of expertise that is held by a government archive, government agency, government something. It cannot just be a privately held record. It has to be a government held record. And you think it ought to be available, but it doesn't seem to really be available or accessible. Let us know. We don't have the ability to monitor every part of the country. But you do. You know what's out there and really is being withheld by some clerk who won't let you see the book yourself, but they can see it. Or there's an issue with a certain state death records never becoming public, which is insane. And all these things are things we can look at over time and work on. And honestly, we are a nonprofit. If we had unlimited money, we'd be launching unlimited lawsuits tomorrow. But we don't have unlimited money. But we could. If you would like to support our work, we would like to talk to you and work with you and work with your organization, if you're with a genealogy organization and get more of these records released.
- [41:08]
B
And if any of you watching are litigators, we will find records in your state.
- [41:14]
C
Probably. Right. That's another thing too. Like we could use more pro bono attorneys, but they have to be pro bono attorneys who know about their particular state's freedom of information laws, which go by all sorts of names, the Sunshine Law and Open Records act, things like that. And occasionally we are approached by lawyers, like, I love what you're doing and like, do you have any experience doing this? And they're like, no, because it doesn't pay anything. And so they're all involved with, you know, corporate law or tax law or something like that. But if you are an attorney, maybe you want to think about learning about your state's freedom of information law. Every state in D.C. has one, and becoming more aware of what the issues are there and potentially taking on more cases to help the public use those laws to get more records.
- [41:58]
A
Sounds like fun work, important work, and something that can cast a light not just on history, but also on how the government runs and how, you know, we can interact with it. Well, thank you both so much, Brooke and Alec, for joining us, and good luck in your records requests journeys.
- [42:18]
C
Thank you.
- [42:19]
B
Thank you.
- [42:25]
A
Thanks for joining me in this month's episode of the Family Tree Magazine podcast. You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes@familytreemagazine.com podcast while on our website. You can also sign up for our free email newsletter where you'll receive free genealogy resources each weekday, including links to new podcast episodes as they're released. Until next time, have fun climbing your family tree.
- [42:57]
C
Sam.