Confused over St. David's Images and DGS numbers

LegacyUser

Adrian Bruce said: The origins of this are in a post by blogger Chris Paton. See http://scottishgenes.blogspot.com/202...

Essentially, if you use "Search Historical Images" and look for "St. David's" and then choose the first St. David's in the list - which is a (genuine) hamlet in Perthshire, Scotland - you get 49 results on
https://www.familysearch.org/records/...

Credit to Chris Paton who immediately saw something fishy about the titles "Abstracts of Copy Wills Episcopal Consistory Court". Turns out these belong to the St. David's in Pembrokeshire, Wales.

If you use "Search Historical Images" and look for "St. David's", you can indeed choose St. David's in Pembrokeshire - there is just 1 result.
https://www.familysearch.org/records/...
I'll assume that it's correctly catalogued.

So issue 1 - the 49 results have been catalogued against the wrong St. David's.

Issue 2 for me is that I am confused over the DGS numbers. The first of the 49 that have been incorrectly catalogued against the Scottish St. David's is DGS 004769478. This will not come up in the FS Catalogue. (Perhaps because it's a fiche??? Not sure if it is or why that matters)

So if I am presented just with that DGS number from someone else's work, how do I go back via a catalogue type function to identify what it is? What am I missing? (I had proceeded so far on the basis of whether it's a film or a DGS, it was all there in the catalog. Except it isn't).

LegacyUser

MaureenE said: The following topic from 1-2 days ago had an example of a DGS number which was not in the catalogue, where a microfilm seems to have been given two DGS numbers, one in the catalogue, and one not in the catalogue. it was stated the left-side pages had been photographed separately from right-side pages, but if there was only one microfilm number, it still seems weird to give two DGS numbers.
https://getsatisfaction.com/familysea...

Regarding your comment about fiches, these were previously stated to begin being digitised when ALL microfilms had been digitised. I have not seen anything which suggests that all microfilms have been completed and that now fiches are being digitised, but perhaps this landmark has passed without comment from FS.

LegacyUser

Juli said: There are many (probably thousands) of digital films that are not properly cataloged on FamilySearch. As I have had reason to comment before, I'm not sure the Almighty Himself has a clear idea of what FS has and where.

Armed with only a DGS number, there are a few different ways to get FS's website to cough up more information. Not all of them will be fruitful all of the time.

Start with plugging the DGS number into the film-browser URL:
https://www.familysearch.org/search/f...
(That's https : // www. familysearch. org / search / film / 004769478 but minus all of the spaces.)

Then you can go to the first image and see, nicely typewritten, that it's "Abstracts of copy wills, Episcopal Consistory Court, St. David's Diocese, Wales, 1821". The breadcrumb trail just says "Film # 004769478", but if you click the little down arrow next to that, you can switch to the waypointed-collection view, which offers a different title to search for in the catalog: "Wales Probate Abstracts, 1544-1858".

Based on that catalog search, you can eventually end up at the collection search page:
https://www.familysearch.org/search/c...
There you can click the "browse NNN images" link to browse the collection with waypoints:
https://www.familysearch.org/search/i...

The new Search Images function may or may not add more ways to find (or lose!) the digital film; I haven't had enough time to explore it properly.

LegacyUser

Adrian Bruce said: Thank you hugely Juli.

"plugging the DGS number into the film-browser URL" is the crucial thing in this instance.

Quite why DGS 004769478 doesn't work I've no idea but I do notice that "Wales probate abstracts, 1544-1858" - which the film browser says 004769478 "belongs" to - doesn't seem, when accessed in the catalog, to have enough "contains" elements - the only St. David's item in there is for the Archdeaconry of Breconshire, whereas when you go to browse the digital images of "Wales probate abstracts, 1544-1858", St. David's has both Archdeaconry of Breconshire and the Episcopal Consistory Court. So the ECC is missing and that seems to include the film in question.

I have submitted Feedback on my (or Chris Paton's) Issue 1 - linking to the wrong St. David's but whether anything will happen, I have no idea based on the stories of the previously wrongly catalogued stuff we have raised here.

Issue 2 (no clue about what the DGS was) is to my mind more important - I can deal with that now but clearly something is awry. I just tried one of the Archdeaconry of Breconshire DGS numbers and it is accessible via Catalog Search / Film Number, unlike the St. David's Consistory Court one. That suggests something is missing from the Catalog but I'm a long way from understanding what.

Again, thanks Juli.

LegacyUser

Adrian Bruce said: Maureen - I have no evidence that this is a fiche - that was simply floating some possible hypothesis that might explain what was going on. In fact, it seems more like the catalogue entries aren't complete - although that's just my latest hypothesis to be discarded as required!