Reclain the Records Announces “The Maryland Motherlode”: More Than Five Million Births, Marriages, Deaths, and Naturalizations Records From The Maryland State Archives

From Reclaim the Records:

We at Reclaim The Records are so proud to finally announce one of our largest record acquisitions to date: millions of vital records spanning over one hundred years of history for the state of Maryland.

These records have never previously been publicly available online anywhere else — not on FamilySearch and not on Ancestry and not on MyHeritage and not on [insert some other genealogy website here] — except for some records that had only been available at the Maryland State Archives‘ internal website, if you happened to be sitting in their building in Annapolis and using their in-house computers, or on their external website, but only if those records were more than a hundred years old.

This announcement is groundbreaking for us at RTR. Not only is this an unusually large cache of materials for one of our records projects, but this time, our acquisition was not limited to a basic name and date index — although we did get those, too! — but in addition to the decades of vital records indices, we also got the digital images of the actual birth, marriage, and death certificates for the state of Maryland. Yep, the real certificates. And now we’ve put them online, free!

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All the files we got may be found in Reclaim The Records’ Maryland State Archives collection on the Internet Archive. There are lots of sub-collections within that larger collection, and then there are “items” (record sets, broken up roughly by the original Archives catalog entries and organization) in each sub-collection as well. You can use or page through almost all of the images and PDFs right on that website, but some of the files are just so large that you may have to download them (whether one-by-one or entire sets) to your computer in order to view them. There are some gaps in the records where the Archives was missing data for certain years, or where the Archives has the data but had not yet created and cataloged digital versions, or where a few years are legally available if you contact the Archives directly but cannot go online en masse at this time. The table below notes the series included in our collection, as well as significant gaps.

Learn More, Read the Complete RTR Post

Filed under: Archives and Special Collections, Data Files, News