Here’s the latest news from Middle Tennessee State University.
MTSU public history student helps reclaim century of records
A candidate in Middle Tennessee State University’s Public History Ph.D. program, Michael McCormick has taken his passion for researching his family origins to a career of multiple, major genealogy projects and most recently an internship that helped release over 100 years of vital records in the state of Maryland.
McCormick worked with nonprofit Reclaim the Records — a group of advocates from the genealogy field and beyond working to identify important genealogical record sets that are not online or easily accessible to the public — to make an estimated 5 million records such as birth, marriage and death certificates free and accessible to the public, one of the organization’s largest acquisitions to date, according to its website.
“There are legal and health reasons why a person should have rights to research vital records and family tree data, to be able to build their history,” McCormick said. “(Releasing records) makes researching multiple individuals and families for broader projects in families, or history topics, much more doable.”