Sometimes in the course of human events we have to recognize the heroes amongst us...to paraphrase a famous American document (the preamble to the United States Declaration of Independence.) I am honored to take this opportunity and space to pay homage to one such group of people at an organization called: Reclaim The Records. Their motto is: "Public data for public use."

I encourage you to visit their website and see first-hand the tremendous work this small group of dedicated people are doing to assist all of us in getting timely and reasonably priced access to our own government records. They have already amassed an impressive amount of data and are sharing it free of charge. You can also choose to sign-up for their newsletter to keep abreast of their activities and even public presentations. If you are into following others on social platforms they have a great presence also on Facebook (Reclaim the Records ) and Twitter (@ReclaimTheRecs).

It is my humble opinion that this group is providing an invaluable service to each and every family historian, amateur genealogist and most importantly the future of our efforts. If you agree as I do, you can provide financial support to this 501(c)3 non-profit organization. And even more importantly, spread the word about them!

• A difference of opinion is what makes horse racing and missionaries.
  — Will Rogers
• A fool and his money are soon elected.
  — Will Rogers
• A holding company is a thing where you hand an accomplice the goods while the policeman searches you.
  — Will Rogers
• A man only learns in two ways, one by reading, and the other by association with smarter people.
  — Will Rogers
• A remark generally hurts in proportion to its truth.
  — Will Rogers
• About all I can say for the United States Senate is that it opens with a prayer and closes with an investigation.
  — Will Rogers
• Advertising is the art of convincing people to spend money they don't have for something they don't need.
  — Will Rogers
• Alexander Hamilton started the U.S. Treasury with nothing, and that was the closest our country has ever been to being even.
  — Will Rogers
• All I know is just what I read in the papers, and that's an alibi for my ignorance.
  — Will Rogers
• America is a nation that conceives many odd inventions for getting somewhere but it can think of nothing to do once it gets there.
  — Will Rogers
• America is becoming so educated that ignorance will be a novelty. I will belong to the select few.
  — Will Rogers
• An economist's guess is liable to be as good as anybody else's.
  — Will Rogers
• An ignorant person is one who doesn't know what you have just found out.
  — Will Rogers
• An onion can make people cry but there's never been a vegetable that can make people laugh.
  — Will Rogers
• Ancient Rome declined because it had a Senate, now what's going to happen to us with both a House and a Senate?
  — Will Rogers
• Anything important is never left to the vote of the people. We only get to vote on some man; we never get to vote on what he is to do.
  — Will Rogers
• Be thankful we're not getting all the government we're paying for.
  — Will Rogers
• Being a hero is about the shortest-lived profession on earth.
  — Will Rogers
• Buy land. They ain't making any more of the stuff.
  — Will Rogers
• Chaotic action is preferable to orderly inaction.
  — Will Rogers
• Communism to me is one-third practice and two-thirds explanation.
  — Will Rogers
• Democrats never agree on anything, that's why they're Democrats. If they agreed with each other, they would be Republicans.
  — Will Rogers
• Diplomacy is the art of saying 'Nice doggie' until you can find a rock.
  — Will Rogers
• Diplomats are just as essential to starting a war as soldiers are for finishing it... You take diplomacy out of war, and the thing would fall flat in a week.
  — Will Rogers
• Do the best you can, and don't take life too serious.
  — Will Rogers
• Don't gamble; take all your savings and buy some good stock and hold it till it goes up, then sell it. If it don't go up, don't buy it.
  — Will Rogers
• Don't let yesterday use up too much of today.
  — Will Rogers
• Even if you're on the right track, you'll get run over if you just sit there.
  — Will Rogers
• Even though you are on the right track - you will get run over if you just sit there.
  — Will Rogers
• Everybody is ignorant, only on different subjects.
  — Will Rogers
• Everything is changing. People are taking their comedians seriously and the politicians as a joke.
  — Will Rogers
• Everything is funny, as long as it's happening to somebody else.
  — Will Rogers
• Get someone else to blow your horn and the sound will carry twice as far.
  — Will Rogers
• Good judgment comes from experience, and a lot of that comes from bad judgment.
  — Will Rogers
• Half our life is spent trying to find something to do with the time we have rushed through life trying to save.
  — Will Rogers
• I am not a member of any organized political party. I am a Democrat.
  — Will Rogers
• I belong to no organized party. I am a Democrat.
  — Will Rogers
• I bet after seeing us, George Washington would sue us for calling him 'father.'
  — Will Rogers
• I don't make jokes. I just watch the government and report the facts.
  — Will Rogers
• I guess there is nothing that will get your mind off everything like golf. I have never been depressed enough to take up the game, but they say you get so sore at yourself you forget to hate your enemies.
  — Will Rogers
• I have a scheme for stopping war. It's this - no nation is allowed to enter a war till they have paid for the last one.
  — Will Rogers
• I never expected to see the day when girls would get sunburned in the places they now do.
  — Will Rogers
• I read about eight newspapers in a day. When I'm in a town with only one newspaper, I read it eight times.
  — Will Rogers
• If advertisers spent the same amount of money on improving their products as they do on advertising then they wouldn't have to advertise them.
  — Will Rogers
• If I studied all my life, I couldn't think up half the number of funny things passed in one session of congress.
  — Will Rogers
• If Stupidity got us into this mess, then why can't it get us out?
  — Will Rogers
• If the other fellow sells cheaper than you, it is called dumping. 'Course, if you sell cheaper than him, that's mass production.
  — Will Rogers
• If you can build a business up big enough, it's respectable.
  — Will Rogers
• If you ever injected truth into politics you have no politics.
  — Will Rogers
• If you make any money, the government shoves you in the creek once a year with it in your pockets, and all that don't get wet you can keep.
  — Will Rogers
• If you want to be successful, it's just this simple. Know what you are doing. Love what you are doing. And believe in what you are doing.
  — Will Rogers
• I'm not a real movie star. I've still got the same wife I started out with twenty-eight years ago.
  — Will Rogers
• In Hollywood the woods are full of people that learned to write but evidently can't read. If they could read their stuff, they'd stop writing.
  — Will Rogers
• In Hollywood you can see things at night that are fast enough to be in the Olympics in the day time.
  — Will Rogers
• Instead of giving money to found colleges to promote learning, why don't they pass a constitutional amendment prohibiting anybody from learning anything? If it works as good as the Prohibition one did, why, in five years we would have the smartest race of people on earth.
  — Will Rogers
• It isn't what we don't know that gives us trouble, it's what we know that ain't so.
  — Will Rogers
• It's a good thing we don't get all the government we pay for.
  — Will Rogers
• It's easy being a humorist when you've got the whole government working for you.
  — Will Rogers
• It's not what you pay a man, but what he costs you that counts.
  — Will Rogers
• Last year we said, 'Things can't go on like this', and they didn't, they got worse.
  — Will Rogers
• Let advertisers spend the same amount of money improving their product that they do on advertising and they wouldn't have to advertise it.
  — Will Rogers
• Lettin' the cat outta the bag is a whole lot easier 'n puttin' it back in.
  — Will Rogers
• Liberty doesn't work as well in practice as it does in speeches.
  — Will Rogers
• Live in such a way that you would not be ashamed to sell your parrot to the town gossip.
  — Will Rogers
• Make crime pay. Become a lawyer.
  — Will Rogers
• Money and women are the most sought after and the least known about of any two things we have.
  — Will Rogers
• Never let yesterday use up too much of today.
  — Will Rogers
• Now if there is one thing that we do worse than any other nation, it is try and manage somebody else's affairs.
  — Will Rogers
• Ohio claims they are due a president as they haven't had one since Taft. Look at the United States, they have not had one since Lincoln.
  — Will Rogers
• On account of being a democracy and run by the people, we are the only nation in the world that has to keep a government four years, no matter what it does.
  — Will Rogers
• One Ad is worth more to a paper than forty Editorials.
  — Will Rogers
• One-third of the people in the United States promote, while the other two-thirds provide.
  — Will Rogers
• Our constitution protects aliens, drunks and U.S. Senators.
  — Will Rogers
• People are getting smarter nowadays; they are letting lawyers, instead of their conscience, be their guide.
  — Will Rogers
• People who fly into a rage always make a bad landing.
  — Will Rogers
• People's minds are changed through observation and not through argument.
  — Will Rogers
• Politics has become so expensive that it takes a lot of money even to be defeated.
  — Will Rogers
• Politics is applesauce.
  — Will Rogers
• Prohibition is better than no liquor at all.
  — Will Rogers
• So let's be honest with ourselves and not take ourselves too serious, and never condemn the other fellow for doing what we are doing every day, only in a different way.
  — Will Rogers
• So live that you wouldn't be ashamed to sell the family parrot to the town gossip.
  — Will Rogers
• Take the diplomacy out of war and the thing would fall flat in a week.
  — Will Rogers
• The 1928 Republican Convention opened with a prayer. If the Lord can see His way clear to bless the Republican Party the way it's been carrying on, then the rest of us ought to get it without even asking.
  — Will Rogers
• The best way out of a difficulty is through it.
  — Will Rogers
• The difference between a Republican and a Democrat is the Democrat is a cannibal they have to live off each other, while the Republicans, why, they live off the Democrats.
  — Will Rogers
• The farmer has to be an optimist or he wouldn't still be a farmer.
  — Will Rogers
• The fellow that can only see a week ahead is always the popular fellow, for he is looking with the crowd. But the one that can see years ahead, he has a telescope but he can't make anybody believe that he has it.
  — Will Rogers
• The income tax has made liars out of more Americans than golf.
  — Will Rogers
• The man with the best job in the country is the vice-president. All he has to do is get up every morning and say, 'How is the president?'
  — Will Rogers
• The more that learn to read the less learn how to make a living. That's one thing about a little education. It spoils you for actual work. The more you know the more you think somebody owes you a living.
  — Will Rogers
• The more you observe politics, the more you've got to admit that each party is worse than the other.
  — Will Rogers
• The movies are the only business where you can go out front and applaud yourself.
  — Will Rogers
• The only difference between death and taxes is that death doesn't get worse every time Congress meets.
  — Will Rogers
• The only time people dislike gossip is when you gossip about them.
  — Will Rogers
• The only way you can beat the lawyers is to die with nothing.
  — Will Rogers
• The schools ain't what they used to be and never was.
  — Will Rogers
• The time to save is now. When a dog gets a bone, he doesn't go out and make a down payment on a bigger bone. He buries the one he's got.
  — Will Rogers
• The United States never lost a war or won a conference.
  — Will Rogers
• The worst thing that happens to you may be the best thing for you if you don't let it get the best of you.
  — Will Rogers
• There are three kinds of men. The one that learns by reading. The few who learn by observation. The rest of them have to pee on the electric fence for themselves.
  — Will Rogers
• There is no more independence in politics than there is in jail.
  — Will Rogers
• There is nothing so stupid as the educated man if you get him off the thing he was educated in.
  — Will Rogers
• There ought to be one day - just one - when there is open season on senators.
  — Will Rogers
• There's no trick to being a humorist when you have the whole government working for you.
  — Will Rogers
• There's only one thing that can kill the movies, and that's education.
  — Will Rogers
• Things ain't what they used to be and never were.
  — Will Rogers
• Things in our country run in spite of government, not by aid of it.
  — Will Rogers
• This country has come to feel the same when Congress is in session as when the baby gets hold of a hammer.
  — Will Rogers
• This thing of being a hero, about the main thing to it is to know when to die.
  — Will Rogers
• We are all here for a spell, get all the good laughs you can.
  — Will Rogers
• We can't all be heroes, because somebody has to sit on the curb and applaud when they go by.
  — Will Rogers
• We don't seem to be able to check crime, so why not legalize it and then tax it out of business?
  — Will Rogers
• We will never have true civilization until we have learned to recognize the rights of others.
  — Will Rogers
• What the country needs is dirtier fingernails and cleaner minds.
  — Will Rogers
• When ignorance gets started it knows no bounds.
  — Will Rogers
• When should a college athlete turn pro? Not until he has earned all he can in college as an amateur.
  — Will Rogers
• When the Oakies left Oklahoma and moved to California, it raised the I.Q. of both states.
  — Will Rogers
• When you put down the good things you ought to have done, and leave out the bad ones you did do well, that's Memoirs.
  — Will Rogers
• Why don't they pass a constitutional amendment prohibiting anybody from learning anything? If it works as well as prohibition did, in five years Americans would be the smartest race of people on Earth.
  — Will Rogers
• Worrying is like paying on a debt that may never come due.
  — Will Rogers
• You can't say civilization don't advance... in every war they kill you in a new way.
  — Will Rogers
• You've got to go out on a limb sometimes because that's where the fruit is.
  — Will Rogers
• Every person you will pass on the street today is going to die. Living long enough, each will suffer the loss of friends and family. All are going to lose everything they love in this world. Why would one want to be anything but kind to them in the meantime?
  — Sam Harris
• No one can make you feel inferior without your consent.
  — Eleanor Roosevelt
• A woman is like a tea bag; you never know how strong it is until it's in hot water.
  — Eleanor Roosevelt
• Do one thing every day that scares you.
  — Eleanor Roosevelt
• Do what you feel in your heart to be right – for you’ll be criticized anyway.
  — Eleanor Roosevelt
• A woman is like a tea bag; you never know how strong it is until it's in hot water.
  — Eleanor Roosevelt
• Do one thing every day that scares you.
  — Eleanor Roosevelt
• Do what you feel in your heart to be right – for you’ll be criticized anyway.
  — Eleanor Roosevelt
• You gain strength, courage and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face. You are able to say to yourself, 'I have lived through this horror. I can take the next thing that comes along.' You must do the thing you think you cannot do.
  — Eleanor Roosevelt
• You wouldn't worry so much about what others think of you if you realized how seldom they do.
  — Eleanor Roosevelt
• The future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams.
  — Eleanor Roosevelt
• It takes courage to love, but pain through love is the purifying fire which those who love generously know. We all know people who are so much afraid of pain that they shut themselves up like clams in a shell and, giving out nothing, receive nothing and therefore shrink until life is a mere living death.
  — Eleanor Roosevelt
• Many people will walk in and out of your life, but only true friends will leave footprints in your heart.
  — Eleanor Roosevelt
• We are afraid to care too much, for fear that the other person does not care at all.
  — Eleanor Roosevelt
• Learn from the mistakes of others. You can’t live long enough to make them all yourself.
  — Eleanor Roosevelt
• The purpose of life is to live it, to taste experience to the utmost, to reach out eagerly and without fear for newer and richer experience.
  — Eleanor Roosevelt
• No matter how plain a woman may be, if truth and honesty are written across her face, she will be beautiful.
  — Eleanor Roosevelt
• You can often change your circumstances by changing your attitude.
  — Eleanor Roosevelt
• If someone betrays you once, it’s their fault; if they betray you twice, it’s your fault.
  — Eleanor Roosevelt
• Beautiful young people are accidents of nature, but beautiful old people are works of art.
  — Eleanor Roosevelt
• The reason that fiction is more interesting than any other form of literature, to those who really like to study people, is that in fiction the author can really tell the truth without humiliating himself.
  — Eleanor Roosevelt
• Life was meant to be lived, and curiosity must be kept alive. One must never, for whatever reason, turn his back on life.
  — Eleanor Roosevelt
• To handle yourself, use your head; to handle others, use your heart.
  — Eleanor Roosevelt
• Great minds discuss ideas. Average minds discuss events. Small minds discuss people.
  — Eleanor Roosevelt
• It is not fair to ask of others what you are not willing to do yourself.
  — Eleanor Roosevelt
• Life is what you make it. Always has been, always will be.
  — Eleanor Roosevelt
• With the new day comes new strength and new thoughts.
  — Eleanor Roosevelt
• Do not stop thinking of life as an adventure. You have no security unless you can live bravely, excitingly, imaginatively; unless you can choose a challenge instead of competence.
  — Eleanor Roosevelt
• What could we accomplish if we knew we could not fail?
  — Eleanor Roosevelt
• Once I had a rose named after me and I was very flattered. But I was not pleased to read the description in the catalogue: No good in a bed, but fine up against a wall.
  — Eleanor Roosevelt
• A mature person is one who does not think only in absolutes, who is able to be objective even when deeply stirred emotionally, who has learned that there is both good and bad in all people and in all things, and who walks humbly and deals charitably with the circumstances of life, knowing that in this world no one is all knowing and therefore all of us need both love and charity.
  — Eleanor Roosevelt
• You have to accept whatever comes, and the only important thing is that you meet it with the best you have to give.
  — Eleanor Roosevelt
• In the long run, we shape our lives, and we shape ourselves. The process never ends until we die. And the choices we make are ultimately our own responsibility.
  — Eleanor Roosevelt
• Never allow a person to tell you 'no' who doesn't have the power to say 'yes.'
  — Eleanor Roosevelt
• Happiness is not a goal...it's a by-product of a life well lived.
  — Eleanor Roosevelt
• Friendship with oneself is all important, because without it one cannot be friends with anyone else in the world.
  — Eleanor Roosevelt
• Never mistake knowledge for wisdom. One helps you make a living; the other helps you make a life.
  — Eleanor Roosevelt
• No one won the last war, and no one will win the next war.
  — Eleanor Roosevelt
• One thing life has taught me: if you are interested, you never have to look for new interests. They come to you. When you are genuinely interested in one thing, it will always lead to something else.
  — Eleanor Roosevelt
• Work is always an antidote to depression.
  — Eleanor Roosevelt
• I think, at a child's birth, if a mother could ask a fairy godmother to endow it with the most useful gift, that gift would be curiosity.
  — Eleanor Roosevelt
• Confidence comes not from always being right but from not fearing to be wrong.
  — Eleanor Roosevelt
• I think that somehow, we learn who we really are and then live with that decision.
  — Eleanor Roosevelt
• When will our consciences grow so tender that we will act to prevent human misery rather than avenge it?
  — Eleanor Roosevelt
• I believe that anyone can conquer fear by doing the things he fears to do …
  — Eleanor Roosevelt
• Remember always that you have not only the right to be an individual; you have an obligation to be one. You cannot make any useful contribution in life unless you do this.
  — Eleanor Roosevelt
• People grow through experience if they meet life honestly and courageously. This is how character is built.
  — Eleanor Roosevelt
• It's your life-but only if you make it so.
  — Eleanor Roosevelt
• It isn't enough to talk about peace. One must believe in it. And it isn't enough to believe in it. One must work at it.
  — Eleanor Roosevelt
• A stumbling block to the pessimist is a stepping-stone to the optimist.
  — Eleanor Roosevelt
• When you cease to make a contribution, you begin to die.
  — Eleanor Roosevelt
• Every time you meet a situation you think at the time it is an impossibility and you go through the tortures of the damned, once you have met it and lived through it, you find that forever after you are freer than you were before.
  — Eleanor Roosevelt
• One's philosophy is not best expressed in words; it is expressed in the choices one makes. In the long run, we shape our lives, and we shape ourselves. The process never ends until we die. And the choices we make are ultimately our own responsibility.
  — Eleanor Roosevelt
• Courage is exhilarating.
  — Eleanor Roosevelt
• The only advantage of not being too good a housekeeper is that your guests are so pleased to feel how very much better they are.
  — Eleanor Roosevelt
• Freedom makes a huge requirement of every human being. With freedom comes responsibility. For the person who is unwilling to grow up, the person who does not want to carry his own weight, this is a frightening prospect.
  — Eleanor Roosevelt
• There is not human being from whom we cannot learn something if we are interested enough to dig deep.
  — Eleanor Roosevelt
• The Marines I have seen around the world have the cleanest bodies, the filthiest minds, the highest morale, and the lowest morals of any group of animals I have ever seen. Thank God for the United States Marine Corps!
  — Eleanor Roosevelt
• As for accomplishments, I just did what I had to do as things came along.
  — Eleanor Roosevelt
• Lest I keep my complacent way I must remember somewhere out there a person died for me today. As long as there must be war, I ask and I must answer was I worth dying for?
  — Eleanor Roosevelt
• The giving of love is an education in itself.
  — Eleanor Roosevelt
• Since you get more joy out of giving joy to others, you should put a good deal of thought into the happiness that you are able to give.
  — Eleanor Roosevelt
• We do not have to become heroes overnight. Just a step at a time, meeting each thing that comes up, seeing it as not as dreadful as it appears, discovering that we have the strength to stare it down.
  — Eleanor Roosevelt
• All of life is a constant education.
  — Eleanor Roosevelt