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Massachusetts's Department of Health wants to close off public access

www.ReclaimTheRecords.org View this e-mail in your browser

our fifty-eighth pahk yah cah in Hahvahd Yahd newsletter

The Massachusetts Department of Public Health wants to hide public genealogy records

"Same old story, time again / Got so close but then you lost it /

Should've listened to your friends / 'Bout his girlfriend your records back in Boston"

Hi again, genealogy and public records nerds. We're here with an update about something we've been working on for a while. For the last two years, one of our Reclaim the Records Directors, the intrepid Alec Ferretti, has been tirelessly fighting to free Massachusetts vital records information from the Department of Public Health (DPH) and its proxies. Some of these records are already online behind paywalls, while others exist nowhere on the internet, or are only available onsite at the DPH’s research room. We’ve been pushing for access to uncertified copies of records along with their respective indexes that genealogists, historians, and journalists need.

And we’ve been winning! Again and again, the Massachusetts Supervisor of Public Records (SPR) has rejected the Department of Public Health’s excuses for withholding records from us. The DPH has tried handwaving about privacy, fraud, and public safety, and at one point, even reaching for a public records exemption that was meant to prevent terrorism (!). But the law is clear that public records are public unless the government can point to a specific exemption in statute. And they have repeatedly failed to meet that burden.

To their credit, we have actually gotten a lot of really great data out of the DPH in the last year, and we’re working on launching it publicly for everyone to use freely, and really soon! However, we recently got a bit derailed in our publication pipeline by something much more pressing.

Buried inside Massachusetts' latest budget bill, a proposal is being pushed that would upend four centuries of Massachusetts records-access practice. Section 43 of H.5377 would close uncertified birth and marriage records for 90 years, death records for 50 years, and give DPH sweeping power to decide who has a “legitimate need” to see vital records at all. They could potentially use this to close down access to certified copies (which have always been open to the public in Massachusetts) and all the indexes (which are also open to the public).

In other words: after losing a public-records fight to the genealogy community, DPH is now trying to rewrite the law, and wants to do it with a sneaky budget maneuver. Sour grapes, sore losers -- and a potentially terrible blow to public access that has been a hallmark of the state government since Colonial times!

Massachusetts has one of the oldest traditions of public vital records access in the country. It should not be dismantled through a secretive budget rider because one pissy agency is angry that genealogists keep asking for records and keep winning. Vital records help families find each other, researchers study public health, journalists investigate government failures and help descendants to reconstruct histories that were never properly preserved.

Read our director's more detailed account here that goes into all of the antics he's endured in the last year when trying (and succeeding) to get records out of Massachusetts. It's a fun read, if also sometimes enraging. (Some government agencies really, really do not like losing to a bunch of pesky genealogists, but you all knew that already.)

So, if you are in Massachusetts or otherwise care about their vital records, please reach out to the Massachusetts Committee on Ways and Means (the people who deal with budgets) to voice your opinions on potentially closing off Massachusetts vital records.

It would also be useful to write to the chairs of the Committee on Public Health along with Governor Healey:

Governor Maura Healey, Governor of Massachusetts: Contact form: https://www.mass.gov/info-details/email-the-governors-office

Representative Aaron Michlewitz, Chair, House Committee on Ways and Means: Aaron.M.Michlewitz@mahouse.gov

Senator Michael Rodrigues, Chair, Senate Committee on Ways and Means: Michael.Rodrigues@masenate.gov

Senator William Driscoll, Senate Chair, Joint Committee on Public Health:...