Histories

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Reclaim the Rercords

Reclaim The Records is an activist group of genealogists, historians, researchers, and journalists. We work to identify important genealogical record sets that are not online anywhere and not broadly available to the public. We then use state Freedom of Information laws to force government agencies and archives to hand over copies of these records to the public, which we then digitize and put online for free use. Other organizations and companies are then free to make transcriptions and searchable databases of our images and data, if they wish.

Since our founding in 2015, we’ve already won the release of tens of millions of records. We upload all the records we acquire to the Internet Archive, as well as other Open Data websites. When government agencies fail to respond to our requests in a timely manner or are unwilling to comply with the law, we take them to court. We’ve won outright, or won settlements, in several groundbreaking lawsuits in the Supreme Court of New York, such as the release of decades of the New York City marriage license index and database. We have more requests and potential lawsuits pending for other records from other states, and also from the federal government.

The bottom line is this: we want public records to be returned to the public. The law is on our side, and we’re not afraid to use it.

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