ROOTS & BRANCHES

It’s rare that genealogy makes newspaper headlines but the second half of December is usually a “slow news cycle” so I guess it’s not surprising that an article appeared on Christmas Day with a blaring click-bait title of “Ancestry.com says it owns copies of PA historical records.”

That misstated the issue a bit—copies of the historical records are at the newly opened Pennsylvania State Archives—but the lawsuit in question is important.

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, filed an open records request in 2022 asking for all records the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission (parent of the state archives) had contracted for Ancestry to digitize.

In addition to scans of the records, Ferretti also asked for the metadata on the digitized documents, as well as any indexes Ancestry created for them.

The records range from naturalization documents and Civil War muster rolls and include what are often the “crown jewels” for a genealogist—Pennsylvania’s birth and death certificates.

The Office of Open Records ruled in his favor but an appeal to Commonwealth Court resulted in the case being kicked back to the open records agency for further consideration because of Ancestry’s view that production of metadata and indexes would be a breach of contract.

Next week’s “Roots & Branches” will give more background, but the skinny is that it took more than a decade and some heavy lifting—none of it by Reclaim the Records, which hadn’t even been founded yet—to get a law passed to change Pennsylvania from a closed vital records state to one in which birth and death certificates became public records after blackout periods.

To get the best possible copies of birth and death certificates in genealogists’ hands quickly, the State Archives 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, the following forms of access to these records are already available:

• In person at the State Archives in Harrisburg, available to residents and non-residents.
• Online home access for Pennsylvania residents.
• Online home access for residents and non-residents by Ancestry.com subscribers (of which, incidentally, Ferretti is one).
• Free access at repositories anywhere with the Ancestry Library Edition for residents and non-residents.

At this point, one might interrogate a sentence from the “About” section of the Reclaim the Records website, which says “We work to identify important genealogical record sets that are not online anywhere and not broadly available to the public.”

Now read the bullet points above again and ask, who is being denied access to the records?

 A new ruling from Office of Open Records is expected by the middle of this month.