Secret records in England, Lincolnshire, Parish Registers, 1538-1990
I recently received a hint related to George Henry Coxon 9KHR-BLW. When I went to his profile on the website and clicked on the hint, a message appeared in the Record Information panel:
"We're unable to show this record.
This record can only be displayed on certain accounts. FamilySearch must honor the agreements we have with our partners, record owners, and internal policies."
When I look in the Family Tree app, and drop down the same hint, the app faceplants. It briefly displays "An unexpected error occurred while connecting to FamilySearch. Please try again later."
Back on the website, I can use SHOW ALL in the Research Help section. That shows that the record references George's son, Charles Henry Coxon. When I attempt to REVIEW & ATTACH the source, the source linker also faceplants with a message "Something Went Wrong
Error loading source: /ark:/61903/1:1:QPW6-XKYM".
When I go to Charles's profile, I can see that there is a hint for him; presumably for the same source. Looking at Charles's SHOW ALL Research Help, I can see that the record refers to a 1930 marriage between Charles and Dora May Smith, and names George as Charles's father. That hint behaves in the same way as George's.
Looking at the profile for Dora, I can see she has a similar hint.
When I do a record search within the collection, I cannot find any trace of the source.
I can understand that there may be contractual restrictions on what records can be revealed; maybe in this case there is a 100-year embargo on marriage records. Who knows? Perhaps "try again later" means "try again in 2030". The collection details information doesn't provide any relevant details.
So, my questions are:
- Why are certain records restricted in this way and what are the "certain accounts" that can see the details?
- Why does FS even create hints for such records, let alone farm them off to unsuspecting relatives who won't be able to attach them? This is just wasting users' time (but see Q3 below).
- Why does FS actually reveal to everybody the information that it seems it is trying to hide?
- What would happen if a user of one of the "certain accounts" attached the source at some point? Would that result in more mayhem when other users tried to look at the attached source?
- More generally, why does FS persist in presenting these unhelpful "Something went wrong", "An error occurred", "Please try again later" messages?
Answers
-
@JulianBrown38 - I have only done a quick check but my belief is that some, at least, of the Lincolnshire parish registers are on a commercial website, who will have paid Lincolnshire archives for exclusive access for several years. Hence, an ordinary FS account cannot give free access to that data. However, it might be that FamilySearch had involvement in creating the commercial collection - quite likely that FS filmed the registers, possible that they indexed them.
Hence I would suggest that one possibility is that the commercial company "paid" FS for access to their films and/or indexes by allowing LDS church members access (hence the phrase "certain accounts"). Or access might only be allowed at FH Centres, although that's usually made explicit.
Why create the hints? Because if I'm right (and I might not be) , the hinting mechanism has no idea whether the recipient will have an LDS account or not. Putting all the access checks into the front end, before you see the hints, would be pretty horrendous, so the only safe way is to do it as you try to access the record.
The information that is revealed is only the bare bones - it's clearly not a confidentiality issue, so you do see a bit of data.
My view is that the "unexpected error" messages should not occur - you should see something more like the first message you had.
If an authorised user sees the full data and image, and attaches it, you will obviously see the information on the profile (it's not a confidentiality issue, as I say) but trying to see the source won't work - I've no idea how graceful the failure will be though. I suspect that the answer is "It depends.…"
2 -
Could this be the same type of problems as discussed here?
»»
If so, it sounds like the process for withdrawing access to certain indexes and records sets is not a very clean process at this point and leaves remnants of them that can lead to the error messages noted.
4 -
The collection England, Lincolnshire, Parish Registers, 1538-1990 shows up in an Images search https://www.familysearch.org/records/images/ meaning that not everything is restricted from the average user. Only one DGS is available from Images - 7566464 - which covers 1562-1876.
In a recent thread on Italian records, I mentioned the error message showing there is "This record has been removed" when the record is still available on FamilySearch; it's only the index that has been detached.4
