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For the last two years, a Reclaim the Records Director, Alec Ferretti, has been 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.
In a statement to supporters, the organization said it has been pushing for access to uncertified copies of records along with their respective indexes that genealogists, historians, and journalists need.
And, they say they have 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 to assert claims 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, the organization said.
But now the group is concerned about pending legislation
Buried inside Massachusetts' latest budget bill, a proposal is being pushed that they say 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, the group said that DPH is now trying to rewrite the law, and wants to do it "with a sneaky budget maneuver." They said this could be 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 agencies find the rules inconvenient. 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.
You can read their director's more detailed account here. The group suggested that voters should 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.
