What happened to the interface for Canada, Quebec, Catholic Parish Registers, 1621-1979?
The interface for Canada, Quebec, Catholic Parish Registers, 1621-1979 has suddenly changed. I can no longer navigate like I used to. The citation button is gone. I don't even see a way to attach a record to a FamilySearch profile. When I try to go back up the hierarchy, it throws me out of FamilySearch entirely. Is this working as designed? Or did something go wrong that hopefully can be fixed soon?
Answers
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Never mind, mostly. I see that most things have been moved to the side panel. The inability to get back to the page of towns and churches, however, is broken, not user error.
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@Véronique597 Do you have the new interface with the dropdown? That's been rolled out to about 10% of users.
https://community.familysearch.org/en/discussion/comment/623388/#Comment_6233880 -
@Véronique597 I just explored this collection and did not discover any problems. If you are still having difficulty, can you attach a URL?
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@Áine.ní.Donnghaile The collection I asked about is not indexed, so it doesn't have the feature you mentioned.
@SerraNola https://www.familysearch.org/en/search/image/index?owc=https://www.familysearch.org/service/cds/recapi/collections/1321742/waypoints is the unwieldy URL that I bookmarked a long time ago that lets me get to a list of towns in Quebec/Lower Canada/Canada East. That list is hierarchical. Below each town is one or more churches. Each church link leads to the collections (range of years). Each collection link leads to the images of parish registers.
It used to be that the choices that got me to the images would be visible at the top so that I could easily pop back up to a different range of years or a different church or a different town. That's gone. Now, the left arrow doesn't do anything useful, and if I click it enough it drops me back at my original blank browser tab or an error message.
I'm still able to find the records I'm looking for but with more difficulty than before, so it doesn't feel like an improvement. I have to start from scratch with my bookmark for every exploration.
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@Véronique597 The feature I mentioned, and which SerraNola explained, is present on unindexed collections.
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For a while now we have been in a gradual shift away from navigating via hierarchical waypoints to relying more on a broader image search. While waypoints remain for now, they're no longer updated. The fact that there are no longer any "breadcrumbs" visible at the top is intentional.
Here is what is meant by a broader image search which is best done in the new film viewer:
To start with, if the film has many item #’s that are relevant to your research click on the film number to open it in Images. There are some films that have not yet been divided, but there could be as many as 50-75 item #’s. Right click and open item #’s in a new tab so that you can come back to this page:
The links to the creator and custodian will open all the films created or archived by that entity, in this case the Saint-Jean Baptiste church.
Additionally, you have links to the catalog, the HR Collection, and the Wiki page.
To browse as you did with waypoints, open Catalog and click on the Collection link:
That is how it has been designed to work and I will be the first to acknowledge that it’s not perfect. I know there are many errors because I report a good many of them. However, overcoming challenges is how progress happens. It will get better!
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I was just informed by engineering that they are changing it back the way it was for now. They are in the process of making that change now.
I would still encourage you to learn to use the new viewer. It is a powerful tool for your research.
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@SerraNola I did some searching via the image links. That will be fine when it works. But just today, I was looking for records in the Sainte-Marie (de Beauce) collection. There's an image collection that says it runs through 1808, and I needed one from 1803, but the collection ended in the 1790s. I saw this range problem more than once. Hopefully the system will be fully baked the next time they roll it out.
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@Véronique597 I will take a look at that collection, but I agree. Lots of metadata errors.
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