Genealogy during wartime:

Many of the local government archives throughout Ukraine are continuing to scan their records and post them online freely, even as the bombs fall.

But they will no longer do research for Russian citizens, nor accept e-mails sent from .ru domain names. The Russian state archives have also been kicked out of the various pan-European and international archival organizations. Their records are being sanctioned along with their government.

Dear @USNatArchives,

We heard you're moving on to "Phase Two" of your re-opening, and will now be processing FOIA requests from the public again.

Well, you've got mail.

It's the biggest request we've ever made, of any agency.

xoxo,
Reclaim The Records
muckrock.com/foi/united-sta… Dear @internetarchive,

If we do win all those records under FOIA, are y'all okay serving as the new web hosting for literally billions of image files that even the US National Archives itself couldn't manage to ingest and publish?

(Plz say yes.)

xoxo,
Reclaim The Records

🚨 MISSOURI NEWS 🚨
As y'all may know, we at RTR recently won a HUGE LEGAL SMACKDOWN against @HealthyLivingMo. We won millions of records, our attorneys fees, and even $12,000 in fines for four separate instances of the state knowingly and purposely violating the law.

BUT...!
1/ We just found out that Missouri DHSS is appealing our win.

They're apparently NOT appealing that we won the records. (Phew!)

They're not even appealing the fines.

But they ARE appealing our attorneys fees award, because they're very sad about our lawyers' hourly rate. 😂
2/

Did you know that some government agencies consider a photograph of a tombstone -- for a person that they know from their own records was born ~120 years ago -- is *not* a sufficient proof of death to release those same records under a Freedom of Information Law?

Read on.
1/ If you're researching (for genealogy, journalism, whatever) someone who worked in civil service or was licensed, you should know that you can write to gov't offices and ask for copies of their old paperwork.

Reclaim The Records board member @Alecferretti did that recently.
2/

💸 A BLACK FRIDAY SALE? 💸
🤬 NO, A 492% PRICE HIKE! 🤬

Hello again from Reclaim The Records! We're interrupting your probable post-Thanksgiving stupor to bring you some important and time-sensitive records access news.

This is long, but important. Please read and retweet.
1/ Two weeks ago, the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (@USCIS ) proposed an unprecedented *492% increase* in fees for researchers who want copies of historical records held by their Genealogy Program.

Yes, that did say 492%. No, it's not a typo.
2/

This is gonna be one of those Twitter threads where we rag on @USNatArchives again.

Here's an example of NARA giving out false information about records access, and worse, doing so in a way that prioritizes records given to companies rather than those made publicly available. 1/ NARA runs a question-and-answer website called "History Hub" where people can ask about NARA's records collections and get suggestions for research.

Someone asked if they could get some transcribed 1910 Census data, just for one small town in Florida: 2/
historyhub.history.gov/thread/3541

1/ And now for a Freedom of Information pro-tip of the day:

If a government agency is denying your request for a copy of records or internal e-mails or what-have-you, for no apparent logical or legal reason, go make a new FOI request for their staffers' 📅 DAILY CALENDARS. 📅 2/ Yes, you really can make agencies print out and send a day-by-day PDF of each of their employees' Outlook calendars (and they almost always use Outlook). Just make sure to give them a start and end date for the data export.

You would be AMAZED at what you can find in there.

Soooo, you know how we've been hinting lately about getting millions of new records delivered on 4TB hard drives, hinting about our first-ever nationwide records project (not just one state or city), hinting about military records, especially mid-19th to early 20th centuries? 1/6 Well, one of our board members is Jonathan Webb Deiss, a military research specialist. (Nope, not a genealogist, but he works with many.) He is going to be teaching a class at @GenFedInstitute.

And he's going to be spilling the beans about our mystery project there TOMORROW. 2/6

Hi there, fellow genealogists and historians!

Did you know that archivists at @NARA_RecMgmt -- yes, the very National Archives we all know and love -- may become complicit in helping ICE destroy millions of records of rapes, solitary confinement, and deaths in ICE custody? ICE, like all government agencies, generates tons of records. They also have a records retention schedule, saying how long they have to hold onto old records, and when they can start destroying them.

Last year, ICE submitted a request to NARA to change their retention schedule.