I recently looked into websites that make available government data at no cost but are privately run. What emerged was a list that most people would expect: federal laws and rulemakings, court decisions, public influence data, general voting information, and an agglomeration of special interest sites. They, in short, contained the “good government” information that attract people active in the political sphere.

What I didn’t consider at the time was information related to genealogy. This includes immigration records, census data, military records (induction and service data), birth and death records, tombstone locations, social security numbers (especially the “death master file“), and so on.

There’s an industry devoted to cataloging and transforming genealogical information into machine-searchable formats. For example, EllisIsland.org makes available 25 million immigrant arrival records created between 1892 to 1924. Users can search by passenger name, birth date, gender, marital status, place of origin, and view the original ship’s manifest. In addition, some newspapers, like the Hartford Courant, make freely available subsets of their obituaries.

The government has a fee-based genealogical search as part of the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. The National Archives has a list of helpful information finding aides. In addition, many of NARA’s holdings have been digitized and are available from “Ancestry,” “Heritage Quest” and “Footnote”; these services are available free-of-charge at any NARA facility.

I was surprised that businesses regularly use the SSA’s “death master file,” and likely use much other information provided by the government.  I wonder what other information the public would use (or would use more often) were it available online, especially if available in easily searchable formats.