Another Victory for Reclaim the Records!

We want to thank one of our readers, Bob Meinhardt, for reminding us about the newest accomplishment of the exciting, hardworking genealogy group, Reclaim the Records. The last time we wrote about this amazing organization was in February 2020, when we introduced you to them and what they were doing on behalf of all genealogists throughout the U.S. to make public records truly public. (You can read that previous post here.)

Now they have announced a new web page for those of us with Connecticut ancestors: https://connecticutgenealogy.org/. Their website says this is a free searchable database with indexes to births, marriages, civil unions, and deaths from Connecticut. These are statewide indexes and may vary from what is available at the local level. Births are from 1 July 1897 (when the state began to require vital records) to 31 December 1917. Marriages and deaths are indexed from mid-1897 through 2017. Civil unions only begin in October 2005 and were converted to marriages in October 2010.

If you scroll down the page before you start searching, you can read a full description of everything that is available and how to access actual records once you find something in the index. There is also a helpful section of “Tips and Tricks” because there is some quirkiness about the way some of the data was originally recorded. There is a section called “Notes about the databases” that provides some explanations for what you may or may not find, and finally, if you aren’t aware of this group and how very important it is, you can sign up for their newsletter, read recent issues, and, even more importantly, donate to their efforts.

When you submit a search for a name, not only do you get the results in a list, but you also get two graphs; one shows you your results graphed chronologically (on the left, below) and the other shows the location of your surname throughout the state (on the right, below).

Here is a search for a marriage from 1936 (underlined in red). Note the maiden name of the woman, the man's name, the date of the record, and then the city and county, which in this case is Hartford.

This, and the births/deaths, is only an index, but instructions for ordering copies of the records are on the page.

Reclaim the Records and New Jersey Births

The group's last triumph came two years ago when they received a geographical birth index for the state of New Jersey, from 1901 through 1929, the first “online publication of a twentieth century birth index from the Garden State.” What is exciting about this index is that it is divided into counties and sometimes major cities within those counties, which makes it more helpful given that it contains so many names. All of the instructions for using that index are on their website. The Internet Archive is hosting most of the work that the Reclaim the Records group is doing, so when you click the link on the New Jersey page, it will take you to the images sorted by county and year, allowing you to narrow your search.

As you can see, this is a typed index from Bayonne, in Hudson County, but some pages for some counties are quite blurry due to the ink seeping from one page to another over time. The entry underlined in red at the top is for Bertha "Perelman," born 14 November 1910, listed in volume 32, page 39. However, her surname was incorrectly entered, and there is a duplicate entry for Bertha at the bottom of the page with her correct name, Perlmutter.

If you aren’t familiar with the work that Reclaim the Records is doing, be sure to check out their website, read their newsletters, and please offer your support so they can continue to help all of us to have access to public records for our research!