Search for Sri Lankan surnames no longer show results
Hi folks,
My local Family Search Centre advised me to post a request for help here regarding a problem that has us all stumped.
I did a simple search at home for four surnames in Colombo, Sri Lanka recently, and I got more than a hundred results returned for each name, including those for certain people I was looking for. After getting lots of good info from them, I book-marked the page links for easy access when I returned in the following days.
All worked fine the following day, but on my third visit none of the links worked, and I got a 'something's gone wrong' message instead. I did the original searches again, but the hundred-plus results from Sri Lanka no longer show up. When I search using details I got from my first visit, it shows 'no results found.' The official from the FS Centre used her own account, and she can't get any positive results, either.
However, I can still access all the individual record books for Sri Lanka, so they are all still available, even though the search function seems to ignore them. Not all of them are indexed, it says, but obviously the ones available on my original search were all indexed, with all the documents availble to view. I thought that perhaps it had something to do with me viewing them at home, but, as I mentioned, the same thing applies using the Family Portal at my local Centre.
I would appreciate any suggestions to help resolve this issue. Thanks.
Answers
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I don't know if you'll see this before Monday, but if you try again, do you still get the same results as before? Then we'll know if it was just a temporary database issue or a more long-standing problem.
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@Stuart5243 I'm guessing these were civil registration and not church records. It appears that most of the government records have been restricted. However, I'm confused that while the films all say not indexed, a few of them still pop up in search results:
Also, the catalog shows some as indexed, but clicking on them returns no results. I will try to verify if the indexes were intentionally removed or by error.
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Thank you for those replies.
I have tried the various searches again, but without success. When I did the searches originally, I did notice that the birth registrations were all civil, with a few marriage records taken from church records. In fact, the one that does still show up is a marriage certificate from church records, so perhaps it's just the civil ones that aren't showing.
The quick scan I made of the results originally gave me a lot of avenues to explore with my research, but I didn't think to copy the information down, which might at least have directed me to the specific records I would have to look for, so that opportunity is gone for the present.
Fingers crossed, it might still be a database error that will be corrected in the near future. Thanks again for your help.
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A last query regarding this matter, if that's okay: is there a Family Search technical department I can contact about this matter to see if I can regain access. I have continued going through the individual records, but it's going to be a long slog without the results I briefly had access to.
Thanks again.
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@Stuart5243 try the Family Search Support Help Line at 866-406-1830 during mountain time business hours
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@Stuart5243 I have been in touch with engineers concerning these Sri Lankan civil registration records and confirmed it is a FamilySearch error which has been found in other collections. There is not a fix yet but it is being worked on and is a high priority.
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Writing this on 16 June. Results for record searches in Sri Lanka still turning up nothing, or listing records which have little if anything to do with the search parameters (for example in different countries, for names which bear no resemblance to that being searched for). There were quite a few indexes for Sri Lankan Civil Registration records available online before the website was "updated". If you go to the records themselves by accessing them from the catalogue and then trawling through them one by one, you can see that indexes which previously existed have somehow been removed. It does not look as if much, if any, effort is being made to resolve this situation. A once wonderful website has been rendered almost useless overnight. Other countries are affected besides Sri Lanka. I believe Ukraine is one of them.
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Now 22 June. The indexes for Sri Lankan records have still not been restored. If this is being attended to as a matter of "high priority", I would hate to see what low priority looks like. This has been going on since the beginning of the month.
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This was the email I received on 9 June, after several days of frustration:
Thank you for contacting FamilySearch about the inability to access the civil registration records from Sri Lanka. We have confirmed that a system error has prevented access to these indexed records. The issue has been reported and is being worked on as a high priority. We hope that it will soon be resolved. We apologize for the frustration it causes.
Sincerely,
FamilySearch Support
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@Deborah Fernando I apologize for what has come across as a canned answer concerning the lack of restoration of indexes for these records. The truth is that loss of indexing is part of a much deeper problem affecting more than just Sri Lankan and Ukrainian records. It is not that Sri Lanka is being passed over but rather that the focus is on getting to the underlying cause and hopefully finding a universal fix. When I speak to engineers from the records team they tell me it is their highest priority, especially because it stands in the way of fixing other record defects.
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Tyoping this on 29 June 2025. Still no solution to this problem, which has been evident since the end of May/beginning of June.
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Now 7th July. Still no resolution to this problem.
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Like some of the other comments I was able to get access to some birth records and birth indexes but confined to Colombo and Galle. The records were patchy and not island wide. That was around mid April 2025. Since then searches reveal nothing - same again today 9 July 2025. I hope this is sorted as soon as possible.
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15th July now - still no solution to this problem. Are they really more concerned with the appearance of their website than its function?
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@Deborah Fernando FS have an enormous and constantly changing catalogue of images, with constantly changing rules on their accessibility, etc., and, like all organisations, their resources will be limited. Given that our access to FS's offerings is free of charge, I am not sure it is reasonable to expect delivery in a specific timeframe if you haven't been quoted one. My understanding is that different teams look after the different areas, so functionality developments won't be slowing down fixes such as this one. Finally, the problem may simply be complex and time-consuming to resolve, we have no way of knowing.
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@MandyShaw1 Having worked as a computer programmer in the field of software support (de-bugging and problem solving) I find the time-scale hard to believe. Another major maintenance session a day ago, but still no solution to the problem. If there is a dedicated team working on this, that makes it all the more puzzling.
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@Deborah Fernando I also have an IT (and library/information science) background, but if you trawl back through Community threads you will find many, many reported problems with Record and Image data, going back years and giving that team a large backlog. Fixes are not going to be quick unless there is a clear root cause and an easy fix with no impact on anything else in the database - we've seen it happen, but it looks like this is not such a case. The overall data is extremely large and complex, gets a very high volume of on-demand public access, and involves a lot of stakeholders; and some of the indexing etc. was done a very long time ago when standards were different and access to data probably involved interaction with a librarian who knew the physical collections backwards.
Maybe you can access the data direct via the record custodian, as an alternative to the FS route?
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@MandyShaw1 The indexes were actually quite a recent development , and were gradually being added to. Their loss coincided with the decision to use AI to generate indexes in future. Generally if you discover a "system error" (their words) that is causing problems you would quickly restore the version that worked, whilst studying the update to identify the problem. The fact that this did not happen speaks volumes. Finally, the records in question are in another country over 8000 miles away. Even when I went there they would not admit me to look at the records, because I was not a native.
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@SerraNola can you help with @Deborah Fernando's points please?
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@SerraNola Any update on progress on this "system error". It occurred around 28 May, and as of 12 August nothing has changed! Sri Lankan indexes have all but disappeared. One or two exist in Sinhala for the Kurunegala and Nuwara Eliya areas, and some for the Dutch Church at Wolvendhal, but that appears to be it. Previously there were a lot more, especially for Colombo and Kalutara.
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I serve in FamilySearch Support. We got a call yesterday (3 Nov 25) from someone no longer able to view records from Sri Lanka. I told her sometimes the record owner will withdraw permission. She is happy to contact, and have many of her friends contact, the office in Sri Lanka that is responsible to ask them to restore access to these images. It appears from the above discussion that I may have been misinformed. Perhaps it is not a permission issue but a technical issue. If so, she should not contact anyone besides us. Can someone please let me know what to tell our guest? Thanks!!
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This thread seems to have lost its chronological place on the discussions list, I only saw today's comment because I was involved with it previously. Also @-tagging is not working for some reason.
Could someone help Phil (comment just before this one) please.
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@DittmerPhilH Yes, we did have a technical issue, but it has been overridden with new restrictions. As I posted in another thread a few days ago, all civil registration and church records for Sri Lanka have been restricted, regardless of date range. I've asked if this is permanent or temporary, but haven't received a reply yet. The rights management team is working to comply with recent new regulations for several countries, so all of us will need to be patient while they resolve these issues.
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Thank you so much for explaining everything so clearly.
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The Rights Management team has just let me know that, following instructions from the Office of General Counsel, ALL content related to Sri Lanka is currently restricted. That’s all the information I have at this time. Perhaps you can pass the word to other support missionaries—there seems to be a lot of queries.
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