New FOI Lawsuit filed by Reclaim the Records for New York Marriage Records

I am always very interested in the actions of Reclaim the Records. So far, they have reclaimed for the public more than twenty million records. As a former attorney, I am amazed that any government agency would resist an FOI request to the point where a lawsuit would be necessary. The government officials must either not be listening to their legal counsel or they have incompetent legal counsel.

Here is an explanation of Reclaim the Records' most recent action from their current newsletter. You can go to their website to read a lot more about what is going on.

Happy New Year from Reclaim The Records! We're kicking off 2018 in style, by launching a new freedom of information lawsuit, our fourth one to date, against a government agency that is refusing to provide genealogical records to the public, in violation of state law. 

We're going after the 1996-2016 section of the New York City marriage license database, which is several million records. These aren't actual marriage licenses or certificates, which have privacy protections, but it's the text-searchable database index to all of them and to the basic data within. Under New York State law, basic marriage "log" or index data is supposed to be open to the public. 

As you might remember from previous newsletters, we sued for the 1908-1929 part of this same record set in mid-2015 (newsletter #1 and #2), and we sued for the 1930-1995 section of these records in mid-2016 (newsletter #10 and #11). We won millions and millions of records in our settlements from the city in both cases, and we even won our attorneys fees and court fees in the second case. That was pretty awesome. 

We posted all the records we won online at the Internet Archive, but also at a new standalone website we developed ourselves called NYCMarriageIndex.com. And several major genealogy websites, both for-profit companies and non-profit organizations, have now added that marriage license data to their own websites. If we win this case too, then this missing 1996-2016 piece of the data will complete the availability of New York marriage records up to almost the present day. And this time around, the data we're seeking is already in a text database, so we won't need an indexing project and researchers will be able to search it right away. 

This new freedom of information lawsuit -- which, if you want to be pedantic, is really an "Article 78 Legal Petition" -- was filed in the Supreme Court of the State of New York, in the county of New York, two days ago. It's not listed in the online eCourts case tracking system just yet, but it will be shortly; its Index Number is 150250/2018, in case you want to follow along from home. Our superlawyer Dave Rankin is handling the case for us once again, although now he's a partner at a swanky new law firm. 

As always, we at Reclaim The Records have posted our legal paperwork online, everything from our initial FOIL records request (September 22, 2017) to our FOIL Appeal (November 17, 2017) to our actual Article 78 Legal Petition (filed two days ago). We do this both to demonstrate transparency in our work and to try to inspire other genealogists and researchers that yes, you really can fight city hall (or the city clerk, as the case may be).

You can also sign up for their newsletter on their website.

On a personal note, I thought I might do my own small part in liberating some records by volunteering to digitize those in the Maryland State Archives. I realize it is a drop in the bucket, but we are getting better at our job and scanned nearly 8000 records this week. We will probably do better as time goes on.