Our friends at the amazing Reclaim the Records have chalked up another victory for genealogists who had ancestors who died in New York from 1880 to 2017. We have written about this small but mighty nonprofit several times before, alerting our readers to their ongoing battles for indexes and records that should be public but are being held out of sight by unending red tape. Now, the group has announced another victory which many of us will be very pleased to see. Here are the details . . .
New York State's Department of Health (NYDOH) had a small segment of its death index on its own website, but in 2021, when Reclaim the Records asked for a complete index, the NYDOH denied the request. A year later, Reclaim the Records filed a lawsuit under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), and for the past few years, the NYDOH fought tooth and nail to keep their index private, even though it is nothing more than an index and a portion was already online. After numerous appeals in a hierarchy of courts, the NYDOH finally lost its case, and this huge index of more than ten million individuals has now been made public.
- This database includes names, dates of death, locations, ages, and death certificate numbers for about 140 years in New York State.
- It does not, however, contain every death.
- New York City deaths are kept separately from the state, but this index does include deaths from some of the five boroughs before their consolidation into New York City, and residents of New York City who may have died outside the city limits may be listed.
- Three cities—Albany, Buffalo, and Yonkers—didn’t begin to report deaths to the state until 1915, so some data from those places is missing from the index.
Reclaim the Records has launched a dedicated website to this database. You can search in several ways, as seen in the screenshot below.
First is a traditional search screen, but with a twist, as you can use natural language, i.e., a sentence or phrase. Then, look at the top of the screen, where there is a row of tabs.
- If you click on the Search Records tab (black arrow), you can search by a specific set of data, including first names, range of dates, and other filters.
- The Surnames tab (red arrow) leads to a list of common names, another of surnames concentrated by geographical areas (at least one hundred records that appear in specific counties at more than 70% frequency), and another of unique names (at least ten records) by county.
- The Locations tab (blue arrow) has a pulldown menu where you can search by county.
- Finally, for those who are interested in the lawsuit, click on the Lawsuit tab (dark pink arrow) to read all the fascinating details (and it IS a good read!)
What will you find?
In the general search box above, we started with information we already knew, just to see what would be given to us. We added a name and location: “Adolph Barling, Suffolk County.” Below is what was returned. An item of interest on this screen is the “Duplicate Records” box below the map (black arrow). Adolph was a relative, and we already knew he used two surnames, but if that was new information, it could be extremely valuable.
Below the information shown in the example above, the site returns a trove of additional facts, including other people with the same surname in nearby locations, a graph of deaths in the county, a transcript of the original index, and instructions on how to order a death certificate.
We have written several times before about Reclaim the Records, and we hope all genealogists continue to support them, both financially and by publicizing their efforts, as they work tirelessly to help all of us.
You can read our previous posts about them here.
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