Any plans for a "Quebec, Catholic Parish Registers, 1621-1979" Indexing project?

LegacyUser

Simon C. Tremblay said: The Quebec, Catholic Parish Registers, 1621-1979 collection has search fields in its welcome page but not many pages are indexed.
https://www.familysearch.org/search/c...

Given the importance of this collection to North American researchers,is there any plans to create a project to index it?

LegacyUser

A van Helsdingen said: Indexing records requires the consent of the record custodian. In case you weren't aware, the Roman Catholic church has a frosty relationship with the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints-who sponsors FamilySearch, over genealogical issues. Officially, since 2009, no Catholic records are supposed to be on FamilySearch, but this is widely ignored, and many Catholic dioceses have collaborated with FamilySearch in indexing or digitization projects over the last decade.

I suggest contacting the Catholic dioceses of the records you want indexed and asking if they will consent to a FamilySearch Indexing projects of their records. You should also ask whether they have already digitized and indexed their records themselves or through another website like FindMyPast or Ancestry.com

LegacyUser

Simon C. Tremblay said: That's funny that you need permission for indexing, but not permission for hosting. Copyright wise, historical registers were created by people long gone. The microfilms were done by LDS in the 80's. They obtained permission to do that back then. Once the microfilms are created, LDS must hold the rights to those copies.

As for other copies, the church registers were duplicated at the time of production. One copy was kept at the church and the second sent to the civil authorities. The civil copies were microfilmed in the 1940's by the Institut Drouin. That collection is indexed and available at Ancestry and Genealogie Quebec, but these are subscription sites and the films from back then are sometime hard to read.
https://www.ancestry.ca/search/collec...
https://www.genealogiequebec.com/memb...

The provincial Archives (BAnQ) are holding the civil copies and are scanning them, but the scanning progress is slow and the documents are not indexed.
http://bibnum2.banq.qc.ca/bna/ecivil/

The copy on FamilySearch is the one from the churches and were microfilmed in the 80's and the quality of the copies are often much better.

Most useful would be an indexation of the whole collection, so the piecemeal approach of contacting each diocese is not really feasible.

LegacyUser

A van Helsdingen said: There would have been a contract between the record custodians- the Catholic dioceses or parishes- and FamilySearch before they microfilmed the records. The contract is unlikely to have given FS the right to do whatever they wished with the microfilms [I've seen the contract for the 1841-91 UK censuses, and it is quite specific about what FS can and can't do], and consider also that the internet didn't exist then and the idea of an online index was impossible to conceive. Therefore FS needs to talk to the Catholic dioceses and/or parishes to update the contract for the digital age.

I had a look at several random parishes from the collection and see that the images for at least some parishes can be accessed from any computer without restriction- e.g. having to visit a Family History Center. The original contract would not have allowed for that or even considered that possibility, so for those parishes the contracts must have been updated. So at least there is some communication going between FS and the Catholic dioceses/parishes.

But at the end of the day the Catholic dioceses/parishes own the records and choose what is done to them. They are perfectly entitled to stop FS from indexing or digitizing their records.