First Fruits of the ‘Reclaim the Records” Access Project Are Obtained!

Filed Under Collaboration, United States By Jan Meisels Allen on November 13, 2015

As previously written about on Avotaynu Online (http://adam.learnpress.esy.es/2015/10/breaking-news-ny-municipal-archives-throws-in-the-towel-in-public-access-fight/) Brooke Schreier Ganz and Reclaim the Records were successful in their Freedom of Information Law (FOIL) case about obtaining the New York City indexes for 1908-1929 marriage licenses and affidavits. All but two of the 48 microfilms have arrived at Brooke’s and now have to be digitized and indexed! The other two were located separately and will be arriving at Brooke’s soon!

Plans are for the digitized and indexed indexes to be online by the end of 2015. Initially they will be posted online at the non-profit Internet Archive, https://archive.org/. When they are posted, we will post it on Avotaynu Online. While originally it was thought there were 600,000 records it appears there are closer to 450,000 records .

Reclaim the Records has an ambitious “to do” list, including preparing the records for digitization as well as working collaboratively with the genealogical community to compile a list of records that it hopes to seek to obtain next.

In the six weeks since Reclaim the Records started, over 1,000 people have subscribed to its newsletter and over 1,100 people “Like” its Facebook page. If you have not yet signed up go to their website: http://tinyurl.com/pekvmru

Original url:

http://www.reclaimtherecords.org/?utm_source=Reclaim+the+Records&utm_campaign=64353631b3-Newsletter_0002&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_05ada25d21-64353631b3-102856653

About Jan Meisels Allen

Since 2004, Jan Meisels Allen is the chairperson of the International Association of Jewish Genealogical Societies (IAJGS) Public Records Access Monitoring Committee. She is the IAJGS sponsoring member to the Records Preservation and Access Committee (RPAC)* and has served on RPAC representing IAJGS since 2004. Jan served on the IAJGS Board of Directors from 2004-2013 first as a member-at-large and then vice president. Jan presents at the annual FGS, NGS and IAJGS conferences on records access as well as spoken on access to holocaust records in Berlin, Germany (2014) to a committee of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA). In 2013, Jan was awarded the National Genealogical Society (NGS) President’s Citation for her “outstanding and continuing contributions to the Society for her work on records access”. Jan posts frequently on records access issues on the IAJGS Leadership Forum and JewishGen Discussion Group and is the responsible person for the IAJGS Records Access Alert- an announcement list specific to international records access issues. She has authored articles in Avotaynu, Venturing Into Our Past and other genealogical newsletters and journals. Jan is the president and a founding member of the Jewish Genealogical Society of the Conejo Valley and Ventura County (JGSCV). She is a former board member and program vice president of the Jewish Genealogical Society of Los Angeles (JGSLA). Jan started her genealogy quest in 1998 and has been researching her Polish, Galician and Hungarian roots. She was the Yizkor Book Translation Coordinator for JewishGen.org for two of her shtetls: Sochaczew and Stawiski, Poland. Prior to retiring she was a lobbyist for the health insurance industry.

* RPAC is a joint committee of the Federation of Genealogical Societies (FGS), the National Genealogical Society (NGS), and the International Association of Jewish Genealogical Societies (IAJGS) as sponsoring members. The Association of Professional Genealogists (APG), the Board for Certification of Genealogists (BCG), International Commission for the Accreditation of Professional Genealogists (ICAPGen), and the American Society of Genealogists (ASG) also serve as participating members. By invitation, RPAC also includes participation from a few commercial providers of genealogical information.

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About Jan Meisels Allen