The following teaser is from an article by Daniel Klein, published May 5, 2017 at NJ.com:
Never risk the ire or doubt the power of genealogists.
Let me tell you about Reclaim the Records, an organization that brings the fight for open records to the states that hold them. Reclaim the Records was founded by genealogist Brooke Schreier Ganz, a New York transplant living in California who was having trouble accessing some of the New York City Municipal Archives’ indexes for a little-known marriage record group – the Index to New York City Marriage Applications, Affidavits, and Licenses, 1908-1929. This index is the gateway to marriage records that contain far more than what’s on the standard marriage certificate and can be a boon for genealogy researchers. When RTR ran into trouble requesting the indexes through New York’s Freedom of Information Law (FOIL), they brought the NYC Archives to court – and won.
Those indexes – and more from New York and New Jersey (1924 voter registration list for NYC, for example), are available through RTR’s page on the Internet Archive. For free. For real. And those will soon be joined by others from all over the United States.
