Records access notices
As genealogists, we need to be in the forefront of records access issues. If we can’t see the documents that give us the evidence we need, of relationships and more, then our research results will suffer.
But how? How do we stay abreast of all of the challenges there are out there these days?
Challenges like the loss of access to the last three years of the Social Security Death Index.1
Challenges like the new Kansas Supreme Court rule on marriage records, that means that marriage information that had been publicly available for decades is no longer accessible.2
Challenges like the new European Union rules on privacy that may threaten even Holocaust research.3
Just keeping up with the fight on all the front is exhausting — and The Legal Genealogist alone couldn’t begin to keep our community informed the way we all need to be informed.
Fortunately, there are others out there committed to the same fight, who are doing more than any one individual could possibly do… and now you too can have the benefit of this collective work.
The International Association of Jewish Genealogical Societies (IAJGS) has an announcement list, the IAJGS Records Access Alert. When it was started up some time ago, it was only open to select groups. But at the IAJGS 2015 October Board meeting, IAJGS made the wonderful decision to open the Alert list to anyone who is interested in records access.
Here’s what you need to do:
1. Head over to this link to sign up.
2. Enter your email address in the first box for the sign-up.
3. Enter a first name, a last name and an organization in the second box. You can use your local society as your organization — and you can use Legal Genealogist if you don’t belong to a local society.4 (John Doe Legal Genealogist will work, but only if your name is John Doe…)
4. Optionally, you can choose a password so nobody else can change your subscription — but be aware this isn’t much of a security check, and the password may be emailed to you occasionally, so don’t use the one you use for, say, your banking.
5. Check the radio button if you want to get one daily digest (on those days when there may be more than one announcement).
6. Wait until you get a confirming email from the list, and then click on the link in the email to validate your subscription.
That’s it: you’ll then be subscribed, and get the announcements from the list. It’s only for announcements, not discussion. This isn’t a chat list so the only email you’ll get will be the announcements and alerts. That means, of course, that you’re only going to get an email when there’s something important to be aware of, and not just on a routine daily or weekly basis.
Be aware, of course, that the best source of alerts is the community itself. It really is a “see-something-say-something” situation, and you can tell IAJGS about any problem brewing in your area by sending an email to RecordsAccess@iajgs.org.
Records access isn’t something we can take for granted — and it’s not a responsibility we can leave to someone else. We all need to stay informed and to speak out when necessary.
And to do that, we have to stay informed.
Here’s an easy way to do that.
Sign up, won’t you?
I have…
SOURCES
- See 42 U.S.C. §1306c. See also Judy G. Russell, “SSDI access now limited,” The Legal Genealogist, posted 30 Dec 2013 (https://www.legalgenealogist.com/blog : accessed 2 Nov 2015). ↩
- See “Kansas Supreme Court Rule would redact Marriage Certificates,” RPAC blog, posted 1 April 2015 (http://www.fgs.org/rpac/ : accessed 2 Nov 2015). The new rule went into effect 1 October. ↩
- See Sam Sokol, “Could new European digital privacy laws hurt Holocaust research?,” Jerusalem Post, posted 27 Oct 2015 (http://www.jpost.com/ : accessed 2 Nov 2015). ↩
- Yes, I do have permission from IAJGS for you to do that! ↩
Have signed up. In some ways I understand the privacy concerns, but I also think that this is the wrong way to address them. Vital records and other kinds of records have always been community records: part of our covenant with the community at large. And one of the important ways in which we identify and recognize our communities and the links within them. Closing off this information has the end result of actually weakening our communities, and our awareness of community. It has the effect of drawing lines around what a community can be, and who can be part of it. Some of the actions taken to limit access border on silly. Others go past the line of undue oversight on the part of government. It’s not just genealogy at risk here.
It’s not just in the USA. Here in Canada there’s been a long fight about releasing historical census records. For example, in 1904, during the Canadian federal election campaign, Wilfred Laurier, the leader of the Liberal Party, promised that the results of the 1906 census would never be made public. No legislation was ever enacted to put that into effect, but when the time came to disclose those records in 1998, the head of Statistics Canada refused to hand them over to the National Archive of Canada based upon the Laurier promise. There was litigation and several bills in Parliament to deal with the fallout. In my view, the changes in the law mean that the release of census information (92 years after the census) is much more restrictive for post-1906 censuses.
We also used to have a “Long Form” census that the outgoing Conservative government scrapped, citing “privacy” interests (nevermind their other legislation severely curtailing our privacy, but that’s another issue). Today, the brand new incoming Liberal government announced that they are restoring the long form census. Not only is this good news for planners, business, municipalities and other entities that need the information in the present, I hope it’s good news for the historians and genealogists of the future. See here for the article.
Absolutely, this is a world-wide issue, and IAJGS is doing a nice job of trying to be inclusive. An alert today reported that long form restoration!