Could there be an easier way to browse the catalog?
Catalog collections are tagged to places at a specific level of the jurisdictional hierarchy. However, when browsing records of a higher-level place, there does not appear to be any way to include records assigned to the places beneath it.
For example, suppose I want to discover what church records are available for Cook County, Illinois. Searching the Catalog for United States → Illinois → Cook and selecting the subject Church Records returns only nine results. These are the collections cataloged specifically at the Cook County level.
This does not include church records cataloged under Chicago, Cicero, Proviso, Palatine, or any of the dozens of other cities, villages, and townships listed under Cook County. To discover those collections, I must open every subordinate place individually and examine its subjects and records.
This makes comprehensive geographic research unnecessarily difficult. Even when searching for a particular congregation, it may not be obvious which Catalog place contains its records. A congregation may have served people from several neighboring communities, and municipal and township boundaries and place names may also have changed substantially over time.
I understand why records assigned to subordinate jurisdictions are not necessarily included in higher-level results by default. For many civil records, the level of the place hierarchy corresponds to the jurisdiction of the government agency that created the records. Someone browsing state court records, for example, may not want every county and municipal court collection in the state included automatically.
However, this distinction is much less useful for subjects such as church records and cemetery records within the US, where the relevant geographic area often does not correspond neatly to civil jurisdictional boundaries.
Suggested behavior
Provide an option such as “Also include records from the places within this location” when viewing or filtering Catalog results. When enabled for Cook County, for example, results would include records cataloged to Cook County itself and records cataloged to Chicago and all other places nested beneath Cook County. Existing behavior could remain the default.
This would make it possible to conduct a comprehensive subject search for a geographic area without requiring users to search dozens of subordinate places individually.
Answers
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I generally find working with keywords gives better results for my catalog searches.
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@Áine.ní.Donnghaile That works if you have an idea of the keywords you want to search for, which is not always the case. Sometimes I may know that I want to look for nearby church records, but I may not know what churches were in the area. If I search for "church", I get hundreds of thousands of results. If I search for "church cook county," I get 381 results, but it doesn't actually return all the church record catalog entries from Cook County (because some of them only have the town/village name as a keyword) and it returns a bunch of other items that just happen to have be associated with the word or surname cook. Since the catalog items are already tagged to locations and subjects, there should be a way to reliably filter by both parameters.
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I like your idea, but a major problem is that the microfilm titles are too haphazard. One would think that microfilm records for a cemetery would show the name of the cemetery in a searchable column, but many don't. Some reels are now broken up by item number, historic reels remain whole. Both the new and the old reels have identical images, but the ID numbers differ. It's so confusing.
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@tyams these are great suggestions to improve the catalog and we appreciate your ideas. However, as FamilySearch continues to improve behind the scenes, we encourage increased use of the Feedback button which is intentionally placed directly on the FamilySearch web page for easy access, and Suggest an Idea tool in The Community.
Using the Feedback button allows issues to be reported immediately and directly to the appropriate teams, rather than relying on community posts to surface and relay those concerns. This helps ensure that problems are reviewed, tracked, and addressed more efficiently.
Here is a link to the catalog https://www.familysearch.org/en/search/catalog/ When you arrive there click the feedback button on the left hand side and leave your suggestion. Thank you for helping FamilySearch to improve.
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