“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 include both the name/date indices as well as full vital records certificates, covering more than a century of Maryland history. They are now freely viewable in the ‘Maryland State Archives’ collection, at the Internet Archive. 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! And this story isn’t a pitch to subscribe to anything, because we don’t sell data, we release it. There isn’t any login or password for these files, and you don’t have to pay a dime to a government facility, nor to a paywalled corporate-run site. These records are all now just plain free. You can browse them, download them, or do whatever you like with them. (Of course, if you’d like say thank you for their new freedom, please skip to the very bottom of this extremely long page for a suggestion about how to do that.)..”