The following is an update written by Reclaim the Records:

Hello again from Reclaim The Records! We’re that little non-profit which likes to pry historical and genealogical files and databases out of government archives, libraries, and agencies, and then puts them all online for totally free public use (which we’re able to do with your generous support). And we’re here in your inbox to announce a really unique and exciting resource that our work has identified and now made available: the first-ever free public access to the BIRLS database, the main index to the VA’s records of veteran benefits files. This particular stor has a lot of background to explain, so we're actually going to have to break up this announcement into a few separate newsletters over the next few weeks.

But the super-short version of the story is this: we figured out how to get access-by-FOIA to some amazing veteran records from the VA, from the late nineteenth century to the present day, really unusual records that aren’t available anywhere else, and now we want to help you get these files, too.

And so we’re going to start at the end of this long story and show you some of the results we’ve gotten in the past few months: the amazing, unique, almost-always-never-seen-before-by-any-researcher historical files you can now get about pretty much any deceased US veteran who served in the late nineteenth or twentieth centuries, whether they’re a relative of yours, a research interest, or just a famous person whose file you’re curious to peek at. A few examples showing the variety of things you can find in these files:

 • a 1961 handwritten letter from a WWII veteran and actor named William Lubovsky, instructing the VA to please refer to him by his long-time stage name “Will Lee”, although he would later become even better known as Mr. Hooper on "Sesame Street”.

 • a 1919 application for a military life insurance policy for a WWI soldier and immigrant named John (Giovanni) Primo, giving information about his beneficiary — his non-immigrant mother back in Italy, who was likely born in the mid-19th century.

 • a 1987 life insurance payout receipt for a WWII Navy veteran upon his death, payable to his wife — the veteran being Broadway and film director Bob Fosse and his long-separated wife listed on the receipt being dancer Gwen Verdon.

 • A 1988 handwritten letter from a veteran explaining to the VA with some amusement that the Navy’s offer of “education and training benefits” was quite unnecessary, as she had already received her PhD from Yale in 1930, thankyouverymuch. The veteran was Rear Admiral Grace Murray Hopper, a pioneer in computer programming.

 • a 1958 typewritten letter from an undistinguished and poor WWI veteran (and barely-known relative of the person writing this newsletter) facing increasing medical problems, asking for financial help from the VA to supplement his meager pension from the local Cake Bakers Union.

 • A 1945 medical and psychological evaluation of a WWII veteran suffering from bilateral trench foot and what we would now call PTSD. It includes a harrowing first-hand account — recounted in the VA doctor’s notes in his file — about his experiences with hand-to-hand fighting in foxholes in France and Germany. The veteran was Jack Kirby, a comic book artist and writer, who just five years earlier had co-created Captain America, and who would go on to co-create other superheroes, including the X-Men, the Avengers, and the Fantastic Four in the 1960s. But lesser known in his career was his artwork on a 1950s war-related comic book series that was literally called “Foxhole”— perhaps unjustly obscure, given Kirby’s military service, as recounted in his full VA benefits file, which wound up being 211 pages long.

And those are just six of the veteran stories that we uncovered, using this new dataset of more than eighteen million veterans’ names to launch our FOIA requests. It’s more than a century’s worth of data, finally available for free public use.

So here’s the slightly-longer version of the story, and how we did this. A few years ago, we at Reclaim The Records tried to get a copy of a certain large data set called BIRLS from a certain federal government agency, the US Department of Veterans Affairs, better known as the VA. Even thought the VA had already given out an earlier copy of that database (but with fewer years of data) to the commercial genealogy behemoth Ancestry.com a few years before that, the government refused to give the data to us. The VA actually claimed that their own internal data was so terribly messy and so badly curated that they simply couldn’t give it out to anyone, and thus the BIRLS database should remain unavailable to the general public forever — or else solely available in an older and smaller dataset (covering fewer years) that was locked up behind the $300/year paywall of a single commercial genealogy company.

This seemed rather unfair to us, for a government agency to prioritize handing taxpayer-funded data to a single commercial entity, but not to the public. Also, it seemed like a terrible new reasoning for federal government agencies to try to evade their responsibilities under FOIA: just be really sloppy at maintaining your agency’s internal data and then you’ll always have an excuse to not be able to give any of it to the public.

So obviously, we sued the VA in federal court to get the records under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), because that’s the sort of thing we do.

And after fighting about it for a few years, we won our lawsuit and thereby won the database! And the data we won was a far more complete version of the BIRLS database, containing all records where the VA believed the veteran had died prior to mid-2020. But we didn’t publicly announce our win at the time, because the judge’s ruling had also stipulated that the VA didn’t have to turn the data over to us until about two more years after the ruling, to give the VA more time to try to clean up their own internal data mess. But eventually they gave us a copy, and it’s finally online now.

We just launched a search engine for that data, a free new mini-website at BIRLS.org. The information in this database covers over eighteen million deceased US veterans, possibly the single largest public data set on US veterans ever released. And this is the first time it’s ever all been free and public (rather than paywalled), and it’s even downloadable, if you for some strange reason prefer to directly download ginormous CSV files.

But the giant database we won is really just the index to the underlying files. And so —this is the really unusual part of our story! — we also built a really cool new feature into this searchable website:

If you find someone of interest listed in the search results at BIRLS.org, you can also send a FOIA request to the VA right from your web browser asking the VA to send you the full underlying benefits claims file from their warehouse for that particular veteran.

These files we’ve helped to shake loose from the VA, the ones which are being indexed by the BIRLS database, are veterans’ benefits claim files, also called C-Files (not to be confused with the immigration-related C-Files you can get from USCIS). These C-Files are a compilation of all the different types of benefits claims a veteran (or their relatives) made (or tried to make) to the VA related to their previous military service: claims for health care, disability or life insurance policies, educational benefits (the GI Bill), mortgage assistance (VA loans), and more.

Basically, these files are the modern versions of the Civil War pension files or other veteran files held at the National Archives (NARA) which genealogists have used for years. Except these files are still held at the VA, because they’re much newer, and ~95% of them have never been sent over to NARA, and so almost nobody has ever seen them or used them.

“Filing the FOIA for them” means the VA will search for and pull the actual folder from their warehouse shelves, digitally scan the contents, and send it to you by mail on a DVD, or occasionally as paper photocopies. There could be ten items in that folder, or fifty, or even hundreds of pages of materials, from medical reports, to letters, to computer punch cards for pension payouts, even copies of vital records like marriages and divorce decrees, and there’s really no way to know what’s in a file in advance. You just have to search, and then make the FOIA request, and then wait a few months to see what you get.

And if you can’t find a deceased veteran’s name listed in the database, don’t worry. The VA may still have a file about them which you can request, but it just might not have been indexed into the BIRLS database. This is especially likely if the veteran (or their family) didn’t have any ongoing contact with the VA in or after the 1970s, which is when the BIRLS database first started getting built. So to deal with that possibility, we also built a new “build your own FOIA” system into our new website, so you can still make FOIA requests for C-Files even if the veteran’s name isn’t indexed in the BIRLS database. (They have a slightly lower chance of working, but hey, they’re free!)

Oh, and there are quite a few non-veterans listed in the BIRLS database too, including some civilians who worked for federal agencies like NOAA, who might have been entitled to some types of benefits such as VA home loans. And there are even a surprisingly large number of non-US veterans included in the BIRLS database, specifically Filipino nationals who served in the Philippine Commonwealth Army, the Philippines Scouts, the Philippine Guerrilla and Combination Service, or other service during the time period that the Philippines was an unincorporated territory and commonwealth of the United States, from 1935 to 1946.

Like we said, there is a lot of background and material to explain with this new data release. And this is just the beginning.

We’ll have a lot more to say about the BIRLS database contents (and the database’s flaws), the multi-year lawsuit we had to file in SDNY to get this material out of the VA and into the public domain, and more of the incredible stories we’ve found when FOIA’ing veterans’ C-Files from the late nineteenth century to the (almost) present day. But for now, we think it’s time to stop writing this first newsletter and turn the website over to you guys, to let you start searching and discovering and requesting records for yourself.

A huge thank you to to the approximately fifty beta testers from both the genealogy and FOIA research communities, who quietly worked with us on this project over the past few months. They gave us suggestions, made bug reports, and collectively filed more than 1,100 FOIA requests for C-Files, as we all stress-tested the system, meaning both our shiny new website and the VA’s creaky internal processes for file production. In the coming days and weeks, some of the beta testers will be posting their own blog entries and social media reports about the great stuff they’ve been finding in these C-Files about their relatives or research interests.

And now that we’re going public with the new website and its FOIA-filing capabilities, we hope that you too will find incredible materials.

Finally, we want to emphasize that we’re bringing this project to the general public for free. We filed the original lawsuit for free, we built the website for free, and we designed and built the new free-FOIA-filing-by-fax (yes, fax!) system for free. But hiring lawyers, running servers, and handling fax and e-mail APIs and data storage costs and so on — well, that’s not actually free to us. And we’re not a commercial genealogy behemoth with an expensive subscription model, we’re a little non-profit.

So if you want to see more great projects like this one, where we employ Feats of Strength to make government agencies turn over incredibly important data sets to the public domain, and where we have the Airing of Grievances to explain how to find, acquire, and use these once-hidden amazing files… Well, 'tis the season to be generous, and our little non-profit would cheerfully accept a Festivus present or two. Your generous support makes projects like this one possible.

We hope you enjoy the new website, and find terrific things in the new files!