Planned fee increases to hit genealogists hard

At a time when researching family history is booming, the nation’s immigration and citizenship agency has proposed dramatically hiking fees to access records from the first half of the 20th century. The move has outraged professional and amateur genealogists, who argue that the increases would effectively put valuable immigration information out of reach for many.

The fees would nearly triple, and in many cases they would rise nearly 500 percent, from $130 to $625 to obtain a single paper file. The little-known Genealogy Program administered by U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services allows genealogists, family historians and other researchers to obtain citizenship and alien registration files, visa applications and other records documenting the lives of deceased immigrants who arrived in the United States between the late 19th and mid-20th centuries.

The waves of western and southern Europeans who came through Ellis Island at the turn of the century are included in the records, as are Jews who sought refuge from Nazi Germany before World War II and Mexican guest farmworkers who helped stem the labor shortage during the conflict. They were followed by Holocaust survivors and those fleeing Communist rule in Central Europe and the Soviet Union.

The files sometimes include hundreds of pages.

The fee increase “has to be very important to anyone who does hobbyist genealogy. It would make it impossible for most average people to access” the files, said Rich Venezia, a Pittsburgh-based professional genealogist who teaches courses on how to obtain the USCIS records.

Venezia is spearheading a campaign to persuade the agency to withdraw the fee hikes.

U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services officials say the agency must increase fees across the board to avoid a $1.26 billion annual budget shortfall. A date has not been set for the new fees to go into effect.