The following is a notice written by Reclaim the Records:

Updated public datasets now available for more years of the Missouri Birth Index and Missouri Death Index, including the first pandemic era death files

Hi again from Reclaim The Records! Today we're announcing a big update to two important record sets that we initially put online a few years ago. Big, like about a million records, including the (or one of the) first-ever full state death data files available from a state department of health from the pandemic era.

And as usual, we're releasing it all for FREE use, reuse, downloading, uploading, remixing, and — best of all — for searches on our free websites, including searching by surnames, given names, soundalike names, common nicknames, close spelling variants, wildcard searches, names combined with dates, and even searching by specific date ranges with no name data at all. Yay, open data!

 

But first, the juicy backstory

Between 2016 and 2020, our organization filed, fought, and eventually won (yay!) a huge Missouri Sunshine Law case against the state's Department of Health and Senior Services (DHSS). We had asked them for something pretty simple, just lists of people who were born or who had died in the state, which is something that their state law explicitly allows, and which they had given out or sold in more limited fashion to journalists and researchers for decades. We thought such data could also be useful to genealogists and other researchers.

The data was already stored in a big agency database, so they just needed to dump it to a few files, in CSV or even Microsoft Excel format, and send them to us on a USB drive or by file transfer. And under the law, they could only charge us for the actual hours of time needed to fulfill the request and produce the files, and paid at the actual hourly rate of the lowest-paid person on their staff capable of running the export function.

But that's not what happened. What we thought was going to be an easy-peasy public records request for a few weeks and a few hundred dollars turned into one of our most bonkers cases ever, eventually costing the taxpayers of Missouri a low six figures in attorneys fees, four separate fines, and even interest payments. See, Missouri knew that we were going to put the entirety of this public data online for free searches and free downloads and free reuse, and all that good stuff -- because that's what we do! But that would mean that DHSS, the state agency that "owned" it, would probably no longer profit from selling subsets of the data over and over every year, money that usually would have gone right back into their agency budget. They would have lost their (slightly) profitable monopoly on public data.

And so, in 2016, the state of Missouri attempted to charge Reclaim The Records $1.5 million dollars (yes, you read that right!) for two simple database extracts of the basic lists of names and dates in the Missouri Birth Index and Missouri Death index. They were clearly hoping that grotesquely large dollar figure would discourage us, and make those annoying genealogists go away.

Fast forward four years later -- although the process sure didn't seem fast at the time -- and Reclaim The Records kicked their ass in court.

If you want a rundown of the gory details -- which ranged from padding public employee fees with fake "overhead" costs, to sudden attempts to ram a bill through the Missouri State Legislature, to their then-Attorney General now-Senator Josh Hawley getting called out by that year's Pulitzer Prize winning local reporter specifically for his office's mishandling of the case, to citations of the Merriam-Webster Dictionary in the legal filings, to the second-highest assessment of fines against a state agency in a Sunshine Law case in state history for knowingly breaking the law, and so on -- we invite you to read some our earlier newsletters all about the case:

And some of the case's press coverage, too:

That last article is especially important, because while we had filed our original Sunshine Law requests in early 2016 for genealogical reasons, the judge's eventual decision in early 2020 also created a strong legal precedent for the state being forced to release death data to the public for public health and government transparency reasons during the coronavirus pandemic.

In the years since we won and put the original batches of state birth and death data online, we have gone back to DHSS with several new Sunshine Law requests for more years of data, and we're pleased to report that we haven't had a problem with them since. And these years have included, of course, the first-ever aggregated lists of people who died in Missouri during the pandemic, although of course the statewide basic death index does not show any medical information nor cause of death. Still, this is important data to be available to the public, whether individual genealogists, or journalists, or epidemiologists, or anyone who wants to see better transparency for public taxpayer-funded data. 

Cool. What's in this new data update?

Reclaim The Records is proud to announce the addition of the following data sets to the Missouri Birth Index and Missouri Death Index websites for free searches -- and to the public domain, for use and reuse:

Important note: in both cases, the 2022 data files are legally considered "provisional" releases by the state of Missouri. meaning that they may have some mistakes or missing records. The finalized copies of the 2022 birth data and 2022 death data will likely be released in mid-2024, along with the provisional data sets from 2023. We've added little warning symbols next to any 2022 births and deaths that pop up in the search results to let people know about this.

Another important note: the official 1910-1919 state birth index file is highly incomplete, because the statewide compliance with vital records registration laws was not-great back then. You might be able to find other sources for pre-1920 birth data from towns, cities, or counties that kept their own records, or from churches and religious communities, not all of whom may have reported their information to the state level. And some pre-1910 Missouri birth and death records are available on the Missouri Secretary of State's website.

The Secretary of State's website also hosts scanned copies of all Missouri death certificates that are more than fifty years old (i.e. 1910-1972 at the moment). Over the years, these files have been name-and-date-indexed by volunteers, including indexing for the deceased person's parents' names and spouse's name for the records starting in 1955. And so we have updated our website's search results to indicate when a scanned and online copy might be available for a record in our dataset, and to link to their site, when possible.

The original .CSV data files for the birth and death indices are also available for download, hosted at the Internet Archive, and linked from our websites. Do whatever you like with them, they're public domain. We just kindly ask that you cite us somewhere and link back to our website if you use them in something, please.

And indeed, it's that time in our newsletter when we mention our website again. We like getting public data released to the public. We really, really like it, even if it sometimes involves a multi-year fight with a state (or city, or federal agency, or government archive or library) to get it. This Missouri case was a particularly crazy case, but we have a lot of cases (several we haven't even announced publicly yet!) where the behavior of government agencies has been less-than-awesome, and we could sure use some help fighting them in court, when needed.

And we can only do that with your help. If you like seeing records like these Missouri vital indexes go online for free, for everyone, forever, and you want to see us keep doing this kind of thing, and in more states nationwide, please consider making a donation to help fund our work. We really appreciate your support! You can donate on our website.

Thanks, and we hope you enjoy the new data!