Editorial: Who owns Pennsylvania's historical records?

Pennsylvania’s history is frequently bigger than the state.

From the Liberty Bell and Independence Hall in Philadelphia to the sweeping battlefields of Gettysburg to the remains of Fort Pitt in Pittsburgh, the Keystone State is a rich cache of evidence of what came before.

But it isn’t all buildings and cemeteries. A great deal of the state’s history is information.

Pennsylvania has been the site of centuries of births, deaths, weddings, adoptions, divorces, property sales, incorporation of businesses and more. Millions of people have called the state home, creating a vast number of records.

For historians and genealogists, that could be considered a treasure.

For the state, it is apparently a burden.

In 2008, the Pennsylvania Historic and Museum Commission entered into an agreement with Ancestry.com to digitize a long list of records — everything from prison data and Civil War information to immigration papers and military files. In total, there were 45 terabytes of information.

For context, 45 terabytes is more than 3 billion pages of information, give or take.

If you are a Pennsylvania resident, you can access the information for free on the commission’s website — a way to facilitate interest in tracing ancestry and building family trees, but only if you have an Ancestry account.

If you aren’t a Pennsylvania resident, you need an active Ancestry subscription. Normal prices for that range from $119 for six months to $259 for six months depending on how much and what kind of access is wanted.

That’s not that unusual. Searching for genealogical records can be tedious, expensive or both. Ancestry.com has that down to an easily navigable science, which is what makes it the big dog in genealogy circles. The company was acquired by investment management company Blackstone Inc., in 2020 for $4.7 billion.

But a Spotlight PA story is looking at questions about who owns the records, thanks to a lawsuit by genealogist Alec Ferretti of nonprofit Reclaim the Records. In 2022, he submitted a request for all records turned over to Ancestry. PHMC denied that, saying it had no responsive records, kicking off an appeal to the Office of Open Records that snowballed to Commonwealth Court, which then kicked it back to Open Records.

The problem isn’t that the state doesn’t have records to give. First, there are billions of pages of records, which is a challenge to turn over. Then there is the idea that, while the state owns the records, as public documents, Ancestry is asserting its rights as owner of the proprietary work involved.

This is an issue that might have been avoided if state agencies didn’t seem to approach public records from a standpoint of gatekeeping. The request process can often seem more like an obstacle course than a simple give and take. The Office of Open Records will say “yes” to a request, and another state agency immediately counters to a higher authority.

Agencies like the commission should proactively work with the Office of Open Records instead, finding the best way to make the most records available to the people efficiently and economically.

And, if they could do that, it would be truly history-making.