2007-12-20 15:09:37 · 4 answers · asked by bostr8 1 in Arts & Humanities ➔ Genealogy
First question: where from? It makes a great deal of difference what country, or if in the U.S., what State, what county, what city. Is it Military? or VA? or city/county?
From 35 years ago, you may not be able to obtain them; if they are military records, contact St. Louis, they may have them (but a major fire destroyed a lot of their records).
Other than that, you will need to contact the doctors, clinics, hospitals, et al, where he was treated.
2007-12-20 15:26:44 · answer #1 · answered by Nothingusefullearnedinschool 7 · 0⤊ 0⤋
They don't exist anymore, unless a court ordered them to be conserved or he was treated by the VA. File retention laws in this country range from 20-35 years. After 3 years, his records can be sent to storage if there's no reason to believe he's returning to the facility for treatment. After 7 years, they can be sent to the salt mines or filmed (that's almost always just path reports, discharge summaries and surgical reports.) Once they're sent to the record management service, they're dated for destruction. The only way they escape destruction is if they were pulled from the record management service and returned to the hospital. If that happened, then it will be put in a later box to be returned to storage and will get a new destruction date.
If he was seen at a VA hospital, then you need to contact that facility and ask for their file retention policy.
If you're looking for records from a physician, they're usually allowed to be destroyed at 10 years.
Once upon a time, hospitals had mega amounts of room to store things...so they did. But in the last 30 years they've been faced with the need for more room for big equipment and they just can't afford to have monolithic storage rooms for paper anymore. The costs involved in filming make it prohibitive to do it on very much paper. File retention laws made it possible for them to get rid of records that are unreasonably old.
2007-12-20 23:48:18 · answer #2 · answered by GenevievesMom 7 · 1⤊ 0⤋
Well, in the 1980s, a hospital found records on me that date back to 1938 or 1939 on microfilm. So the only thing I can say is contact the hospital's medical records and see if they are even available.
2007-12-21 00:21:06 · answer #3 · answered by Shirley T 7 · 0⤊ 0⤋
If they still exist, it would depend on how old your son was. If he was a minor then you have a right to them if he was over the age of 18 you have no right to them and you would not be able to get them
2007-12-21 07:03:25 · answer #4 · answered by Holly N 4 · 2⤊ 0⤋