Monday, June 22, 2009

Access to California Vital Records Indexes

I posted information about California Assembly Bill AB 130 for a brief time this morning, based on an analysis by Susan Park that was distributed to the California State Genealogical Alliance mailing list.

I received an email from Susan with more information this morning that seemed to make her comments moot, so I took the information down until I could analyze it myself.

The latest version of AB 130 is posted online here, effective 15 June 2009. It says that it is:

"An Act to amend Section 509 of the Family Code, and to amend Sections 102230, 102231, 103525, 103525.5, 103526, 103526.5,and 103527 of the Health and Safety Code, relating to vital records."

The California Family Code sections are available here, and Section 509 deals with obtaining a certified copy of a confidential marriage.

Sections of the Health and Safety Code 102230-102231 are printed here, and Sections 103525 to 103527 are here. They deal with obtaining birth, marriage and death certificates. There may be other Code sections that apply to Vital Records but are not being modified by AB130.

The existing law in the Codes need to be reviewed and compared to the AB 130 bill in order to determine what the changes are and what they mean.

The genealogy community needs to understand what all of this means and come to a consensus opinion that reflects the best outcome for genealogy researchers.

The Records Preservation and Access Committee (RPAC) of FGS usually review bills of this nature and formulate a position. The last information on the RPAC page is from February 2009, so it's not clear if RPAC is aware of this issue or if they are working on it. I hope that they are aware of it and are working on this case.

UPDATED 4:15 p.m. completely revised this post again rather than post erroneous information.

1 comment:

Unknown said...

Randy, the bill has been amended three times since its introduction.

The current version, as of June 15th, is at

http://www.leginfo.ca.gov/pub/09-10/bill/asm/ab_0101-0150/ab_130_bill_20090615_amended_sen_v96.html .

Additional information is on the IAJGS website. Go to http://iajgs.org/pramc/legislation.html and click on "Alerts Page."