Reclaim The Records wins the first-ever digital copy of the New York State Death Index, 1880-1956!

[Brooke Schreier Ganz asparagirl@gmail.com]

X-No-archive: yes
Reclaim The Records is a not-for-profit 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.

After seventeen months of work, we have now forced the New York State
Department of Health to concede that the New York State death index
data is, and should be, available to the public under open records
laws. This data was previously only available on scratchy old
microfiche copies at a small number of libraries in upstate New York,
plus the Manhattan branch of NARA. Not a single website, whether
for-profit or non-profit, had copies, not even FamilySearch microfilms.

We secured the first ever public and digital copies of this important
state death index, which the Department of Health has scanned for us
directly from the original vault copies. They are high-resolution
greyscale images, with the entire set comprising about 3/4 of a
terabyte of data on a portable hard drive. (That's a lot of dead people.)

We're uploading all these files, year by year, to the Internet Archive
(archive.org). Other websites, as well as individual researchers, are
welcome to use, download, and even host the files on their own
websites, and create transcription projects if they wish. The files
are entirely in the public domain, free to use without any restrictions.

This death index covers 1880-1956, which is seventy-seven years! Here
are some things to keep in mind:

- 1880 and 1881 have very limited data, as the state law requiring
reporting deaths to the state didn't have great compliance at first.

- 1943 is, unfortunately, extremely hard to read, and we don't know if
any better copy exists. If there is, we'll go after it with a new FOIL
request and scan it.

- New York City deaths are, for the most part, *NOT* included in this
statewide death index. That's because New York City and New York State
are completely different vital records jurisdictions. However, some
deaths that were in neighborhoods that are part of modern-day New York
City -- such as Flushing (Queens) or Canarsie (Brooklyn) -- do show up
in the pre-1897/1898 statewide death index! That's because they
weren't incorporated as part of the city yet at the time they were recorded.

- Three major cities are not included in this statewide death index
until 1914 or 1915: Yonkers, Buffalo, and Albany. Reclaim The Records
will be making three new and separate FOIL requests to those city
clerks for the first-ever public copies of their 1880-1914 death
indices, in order to complete the missing data.

- Finally, there is some disagreement over whether people who died at
state-run mental institutions or developmental disability institutions
were correctly included in the statewide death index. If you know of
someone who died in one of those facilities, could you please check to
see if they were in fact recorded in this index, and report back?

The full details, and links to the individual years' images, are in
our latest free newsletter, which you can read online here:

http://mailchi.mp/reclaimtherecords/bfvk8vew84?e=8bd0102c13

Enjoy!

- Brooke Schreier Ganz
Mill Valley, California
Founder and President, Reclaim The Records
https://www.ReclaimTheRecords.org/
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