ROOTS & BRANCHES

I’m from a generation that doesn’t think “move fast and break things” is the coolest slogan ever created.

Last week’s “Roots & Branches” gave some of my thoughts about a suit involving New York professional genealogist Alec Ferretti, a director at “Reclaim the Records,” a group that specializes in suing government entities to force access to records.

He wants scans of the records that Ancestry.com scanned for the Pennsylvania State Archives, as well as the metadata on the digitized documents and any indexes Ancestry created for them. These include the “crown jewels” for a genealogist—Pennsylvania’s birth and death certificates from a time period during much of which the commonwealth was the second most populous U.S. state.

The Office of Open Records ruled in his favor but has been asked to reconsider the case and could issue a revised ruling shortly.

As a non-attorney, I can only guess how the agency will interpret the state’s open records law in its second go-round.

But what I do know is that the genealogy community is a system, or at least it ought to be. And how the moving parts of that system work best for genealogists is by including a variety of stakeholders … the average hobbyist family historian; professional genealogists; lineage societies; non-profit organizations ranging from tiny, local history associations to mammoth FamilySearch.org; and for-profit entities, including the aforementioned independent professionals as well as corporations such as Ancestry.com, MyHeritage.com, and Legacy Tree Genealogists.

Some history might be helpful, particularly regarding the birth and death certificates.

Until the passage of Act 110 of 2011, these vital records were considered “closed” documents, available only upon application to the Pennsylvania Department of Health by a close relative. Most frustratingly, the department required the date of death to be known to do a search … which of course in many cases was what the applicant was trying to find out!

A legal change that was a decade in making resulted in Act 110, which made birth certificates public after 105 years and death certificates open after 50 years.

With both types of certificates having been started in 1906, only a few years of births initially were available, but there were some 7 million death certificates earlier than the blackout period.

Genealogists shifted to determining how best to ensure access to the documents, realizing that the commonwealth wasn’t going to have funds to digitize the certificates in the near future.

There was an option that would have involved merely doing microfilm-to-digital transfer of the awful microfilms previously used by the Department of Health in response to records requests.

But the State Archives instead negotiated with Ancestry.com, which agreed to scan the original certificates at its cost—a terrific boon to genealogists to have access to the most readable copies, and put the certificates (and a number of other databases) online for free access by Pennsylvania residents.

So, in this case, I’d say the system worked, and I’m not sure why someone’s trying to fix it.