The Beginning of the End of the FamilySearch Catalog or another Beginning?

 

It is common knowledge among those genealogists that I come in contact with that the FamilySearch.org Catalog has not been updated for over two years. What this means is that the millions of digitized records being added daily to the FamilySearch.org website are not in the Catalog. So where are they? I will leave that question for a while as I try to explain what is going on from the perspective of someone who uses the Catalog and other resources on the FamilySearch.org website many times in a single day. 

https://www.familysearch.org/search/catalog

The main use of the Catalog is to find stuff (records, documents, etc.) on the FamilySearch website. It has worked sort-of well since the website was first put online on May 24, 1999. Its main use for serious genealogists is to discover the jurisdictional organization of the various geographic areas of the world. Now, I happen to do an extensive number of online consultations with people from Argentina. See the following link. 

https://www.familysearch.org/en/library/genealogy-help

Now some a short (hopefully) look at the government of Argentina and its jurisdictions. This is important because certain types of records are located in specific governmental jurisdictions. Here is an example of the location of the Argentine Civil Registration Records. 

Los registros del registro civil en Argentina son mantenidos principalmente por el Registro Nacional de las Personas (RENAPER). Este organismo gubernamental es responsable de mantener y administrar registros vitales como actas de nacimiento, actas de matrimonio y actas de defunción.

El RENAPER tiene oficinas regionales en toda Argentina, donde puede solicitar copias de sus registros del registro civil. Puede encontrar la ubicación de la oficina del RENAPER más cercana visitando su sitio web oficial o contactándolos directamente.

Hmm, that explanation seems to be in Spanish. What is says is that Civil Registration records are found in the National Register of Persons in various locations around the country. If you search the FamilySearch.org website for Argentine Civil Registration records, a valuable resource for genealogists, you will find that FamilySearch.org has very, very few of these records. The partial explanation about the existence of these records is explained in the FamilySearch Research Wiki,  

Now what is going on with the Catalog? Yesterday, in the morning I did my regular searches in for records in Buenos Aires Province for a potential consultation. By the afternoon, when I needed more information I found that Buenos Aires Province had been removed from the Catalog. See above. Some at FamilySearch inserted a link to "Buenos Aires City" which is probably a reference to the fact that Buenos Aires is an autonomous city and the capital of Argentina. But the other issue is that the entry for Buenos Aires Province had been removed. Buenos Aires City is divided into 15 Comunas. An Argentine "comuna" is a neighborhood or group of neighborhoods in the city of Buenos Aires. However, Buenos Aires City located in Buenos Aires Province. Here is an explanation of the provinces from a Wikipedia article. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Provinces_of_Argentina

Argentina is divided into twenty-three federated states called provinces (Spanish: provincias, singular provincia) and one called the autonomous city (ciudad autónoma) of Buenos Aires, which is the federal capital of the republic (Spanish: Capital Federal) as decided by the Argentine Congress.[1] The provinces and the capital have their own constitutions and exist under a federal system.

Here is another quote from an AI search with references to Wikipedia. 

Administrative divisions: Provinces are divided into departments, which are further divided into municipalities. Buenos Aires Province is divided into partidos and localidades. 

There is no real translation of the divisions in Buenos Aires Province. Why is knowing all this necessary? Because any successful genealogical research depends on know where and how to find the records. So now, the FamilySearch Catalog has no entry for Buenos Aires Province. I assume all the records are still there somewhere. 

Now, there is a new FamilySearch.org Catalog. See https://www.familysearch.org/en/library/our-catalogs however, this is what is said on the website.

Either catalog can be searched, however it's best to use the new Library Catalog because it's continually being updated. The existing Catalog on FamilySearch.org was last updated September 2022. 

Let's just say that giving us a list of all the records of Argentina in a list does not help much. Especially, if you do not automatically know the names of all the provinces (see the first image above) and which cities (municipios) are available. Like in the old Catalog. The "New" Catalog looks a lot like a university catalog so that if you click enough you might run across some of the records for a specific location. 

What about the Images? Oh yes, there is another part of the website with digital images of a whole lot of records. These are simply organized by jurisdiction and date. But they are searchable or should I say they were searchable? 

There is an entry for Buenos Aires Province but this is to unindexed and uncataloged records which, for the most part, have to be searched day by day. There is also a mysterious reference in the Images list to Distritos Militar. These seem to be a long list of military draft records with no reference to where the records came from. 

Well, I could go on for a long time but I have other obligations to my time. 

Good Luck at finding anything in the FamilySearch.org record collection if this spreads to other parts of the website besides Argentina. I realize that I haven't gotten into more detail about the Catalog and the Images, but I ran out of time to write.