Can some indexing be done in the Escuintla area of Guatemala?

LegacyUser

Clarence Alfred Freestone said: I can't travel to Guatemala, but my ancestors come from the Escuintla area of the country. Could some indexing be done there. They were Catholic and their record might be in the records of the churches there.

LegacyUser

A van Helsdingen said: For an indexing project, the record owner must give consent. They are less likely to do this if the records are already on another pay-to-use website like Ancestry, or if they make a lucrative income from people visiting the archives in person to view the records.

For some church records, there is an added difficulty in that each individual parish owns its records, so FS has to go to each and every parish, who then has to consider the issue, and return an answer. That could take a long time and be very expensive. It is more convenient when the diocese owns the records and can give consent all at once.

There is also the fact that since 2009, the Catholic Church has a policy of not co-operating with FamilySearch. This appears to be widely ignored judging by the millions of Catholic records that are on FS but in some areas the local Catholic leaders do take this seriously and refuse to make their records available to FS.

And sometimes Catholics can be very protective of their records, and be difficult to deal with. In the last two days I've been emailing the Catholic diocese in Mainz, Germany to ask about their records on FS. Their first response was that they do not own the records and know nothing about FS. When I asked for clarification, they said they had nothing new to add and that was the end of the matter.