The Department of Health in Albany has vital records for most of the State starting in 1880 except for New York City. When trying to get them to send you your genealogical certificate; they are awful. Right now they have requests from over 4 years ago that haven’t been fulfilled. Over the years they never have been easy to deal with and seem to have put more roadblocks on. It’s a long, complicated story…

I started doing my family genealogy about 1977 but I think the first vital record I requested was probably about 1980. Even then they were known as being difficult and could take 6 months or more to get any genealogical record. Some people would get a reply that they couldn’t find any record of the event. We now know that even though vital record started to be collected in 1880 that compliance was poor until at least the 1910s.

About 1990 the Department made an announcement that they had indexes to vital records on microfiche but only at their office in Albany. At first you could drop in. Then after a couple of months you had to make an appointment. I made the 4+ hour trip a few times. One of the reasons for going there was that if you gave them a name, date and index number they would send you a certificate for $1.50 instead of the regular price which then was about $10 – $12. By that decreased price, we know that it was a lot easier for them to find a certificate when they didn’t have to look up the index number themselves. Also you could order up to 10 certificates at a time for that cheap rate. I ordered about 30 certificates! That reduced price certificate program didn’t last long, maybe 6 months to a year. Plus they didn’t really like to deal with the visitors to their office.

In 1992 the Department sent all the indexes to the NY State Archives, which is another building on Empire State Plaza in Albany. Again, the only place to view the indexes was in Albany which made it difficult to see the indexes for almost everyone including most NY residents.

It is hard to determine when the indexes to the vital records were created. My best guess is that the indexes up to 1939 were created in the 1950s as they are typed. Beginning with 1940 the indexes are computer print-outs so they would have to have been created in the 1960s at the earliest. The original paper copies of the indexes were probably destroyed many years ago from so much use.

Then next thing to happen in relation to the vital record indexes was in 2001 when the Rochester Public Library was somehow able to obtain microfiche copies of those indexes. They had to maintain very tight control of the microfiche. I was told that people from the Department of Health would visit and make sure the microfiche were handled properly and not being copied. Other libraries in the State would get copies of the microfiche indexes over the next year or so. Eventually there would be 10 places around the State with the indexes.

In January 2016 Reclaim the Records filed a Freedom of Information request to get copies of the death indexes. The Department of Health fought hard against them getting the indexes. The Department even tried to say that the copies would cost over $150,000 when the actual cost should be about $3,000. It dragged on until 2019 when Reclaim the Records suddenly got a hard drive with all the death index pages. Even more surprising was that there was no charge. The Department had used Ancestry.com to do the scanning and the death indexes showed up on Ancestry even before Reclaim the Records could find a place to host the indexes.

Reclaim the Records followed up requests for the marriage and birth indexes. The Department wasn’t happy, again, but eventually they had Ancestry also digitize those indexes. So now the indexes are on Ancestry, FamilySearch and the Internet Archive, where Reclaim the Records put their copies.

If the indexes were then fairly easily available then you would think that the Department of Health would get more requests for those old vital records. Yes, they did. And they sure didn’t like having more work to do.

Ray Crego, on the New York State Genealogy group on Facebook has been keeping track of the wait time for the Department to reply for a genealogy request. In 2017 it took an average of 7 months. I think that is too long but the wait time kept going up. In 2019 it took an average of 12 months. You can see Ray’s whole spreadsheet at this link (on Dropbox).

A new law in 2020 allowing adult adoptees to finally get their original birth certificate resulted in an increase in requests for those records. COVID slowed everything down even though I don’t think the Department of Health completely shut down for long.

There was a sneaky shortcut at one time. If you dropped a request off at the Department’s Vital Records office in Menands, the Albany suburb where the records are actually housed, you would get a certificate in a very short time. In 2018 the average wait time for a request by mail was 9 months while a drop-off was filled in just a month. The drop-off availability stopped in 2020 because of COVID and has not ever been resumed.

Real ID has added to the number of requests for a birth certificate over the last couple of years. You don’t need a birth certificate to get a Real ID but you do if you want to get the Enhanced ID that lets you easily get in to Canada or Mexico. That’s why I got the Enhanced ID a few years ago. Again, that pushed genealogy requests to the back of the line.

There have been times in the last couple of years when the Department completely stopped fulfilling genealogy requests. So their response time keeps getting longer. For 2024 Ray Crego says that it takes an average of 53 months to fulfill a genealogy request.

In Nov. 2024 Channel 6 in Albany ran this report on the backlog. They reported that the backlog of genealogy requests for records was 10,831. The next day in this report Dr. James McDonald, the Commissioner of the Department of Health, replied to the Channel 6 report.

Let’s look at the numbers…

If there was a backlog of 10,831 records that go back 4 years, that means they only get 2.708 request per year or 7½ per calendar day. Not every day is a work day. If you divided 2,708 requests by 250 work days they would only have to fill less than 11 per day. You or I could do in a day even if we had to look up the file number. We know from way back in 1990 it takes substantial less time to copy and send a certificate if you give them the file number. I think that in the past few years they only had 2 employees doing the genealogy requests. I don’t think they are fulfilling any genealogy requests at this time.

Commissioner McDonald briefly mentions that you can get certificate from a town or village where the event occurred. The problem with that is towns and villages send a transcription which can introduce new errors. Some towns and villages have trouble finding old records or may have even lost them. The State has the original certificates. The Department of Health is just trying to pass off the genealogy requests to make their workload less.

The Commissioner said that he and his Department were looking at solutions. Then came the 2025-26 NY State Budget Bill. Part U of that budget had the solution. They would restrict access for genealogy requests for an even longer time. Birth records would move from being restricted from 75 years to 125 years. Marriage records would be restricted for 100 years instead of the current 50 years. Then death records would be available only after 75 years rather than the current 50 years. Plus the cost would jump from the current fee of $22 to a possible $95. That shows what the Department thinks about you as a family historian. There was another part in that budget bill that didn’t make any sense. It said that they would eliminate creating indexes to records. How would they find a record without an index?

Even though comment time on the Budget Bill was short there were many letters and emails written. Some genealogy organizations also appeared at budget hearings even though the legislators that chaired the hearing acted like they had no idea what the problem was. When the Budget Bill finally got passed Part U with all the new restrictions was gone. I don’t know if the Department of Health got some more money to hire a few more employees to get rid of their backlog. I’m not hopeful that they did.

A couple of weeks ago Reclaim the Records wrote a Bill that would direct the New York State Department of Health to work with a private partner to finish digitizing all of the state’s historical birth, marriage, and death records and put them online with searchable indexes. The thing that might appeal to the Department is that they wouldn’t have to pay to have the records digitized. That would be done by the private partner. This Bill is sponsored by Senator James Skoufis and Amy Paulin in the NY Assembly. Will this Bill become a Law? The NY Legislative Session ends in June and they have a lot of other Bills to consider in a short amount of time. Isn’t about time that we had access to all the old vital records?

There may be some minor mistakes in this long blog post. If you see anything that needs correcting, either add a comment or send me a personal email at: dickhalsey@gmail.com and I will make the corrections.