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by drewg123 1545 days ago
Yes, they are the best. I used them several years ago when constructing my family tree.

And a big raspberry to their competitors that lock everything behind a paywall. I think one of them (ancestry) has exclusive deals with some states, so they have records you can't see without signing up.
1 comments
Asparagirl 1545 days ago
They do. I’ve seen the contracts, and even the RFP’s that led to the contracts. It’s illegal.

They will sometimes make a free gateway portal to those records, where you input your in-state zipcode to get access, or some other nonsense like that. But they actually have the gall to say in their contracts that the digital files cannot be redistributed by the (public, taxpayer-funded) state or local archive. Funny, the state law says they can’t do that…

And so the non-profit I founded and run is starting to reclaim those public records, for the public, for free.

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tomcam 1545 days ago
https://www.reclaimtherecords.org/

Excellent website and a great cause. I just donated.

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JaimeThompson 1545 days ago
If you can please link to the non-profit here, I think a lot of us would enjoy it.
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Asparagirl 1545 days ago
It’s in my HN bio, but here you go ;-)

https://www.reclaimtherecords.org/

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JaimeThompson 1545 days ago
Thanks! Honestly I should have checked first but we can pretend that we did it for (rolls d20) SEO!

Looks very nice BTW.

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