FamilySearch Quietly Starts Releasing Indexed Mexican Civil Registration Collection

Excellent news for my fellow Mexico researchers! FamilySearch quietly started rolling out its indexed Mexican Civil Registration collection last week.

In a February 2nd collection update media release FamilySearch announced: “Find your Mexican ancestors on FamilySearch with over 63 million new Mexico historic records published this week”. The announcement reports “Added indexed records to an existing collection” for all of the state and federal district collections.¹

The digitized civil registration state collections have been available on FamilySearch for a long time, but not as an indexed collection. One had to browse through the unindexed (not searchable) collection. Being indexed means these collections should now be searchable, both through the Catalog search tool and through the Historical Records search tool.

Ancestry’s Collection

Ancestry launched access to the Mexican Civil Registration collection in late October 2015. This was done through a partnership with FamilySearch; the digitized images in Ancestry’s collection hosted are on FamilySearch servers. Ancestry’s big announcement from 2015 reads:

More than 220 million searchable historical records from Mexico, including new birth, marriage, and death records dating back to the 1500s are now available on the Ancestry site, many of them important historical records never before available online.²

This partnership gave Ancestry the exclusive right to the indexed (searchable) collection for a period of time, in return for Ancestry investing the money and time necessary to index this collection. I attended a fascinating talk by FamilySearch on SLIG Night in the Family History Library during SLIG 2017, where a FamilySearch representative discussed FamilySearch’s digitization projects and priorities, and during this talk, he discussed this specific partnership with Ancestry, referencing the exclusivity agreement, which would expire in 2018.

FamilySearch’s Collection

Here we are in 2018, and it appears that this exclusivity agreement has ended earlier than I thought it would (I was anticipating October 2018, three years from Ancestry’s collection launch). This is speculation on my part. FamilySearch has not made any official announcement. But last week’s media update about “Added indexed records to an existing collection” certainly implies that this exclusivity period is coming to an end.³

I used the link (from the table below) to access the newly indexed civil registration records for my ancestral state of San Luis Potosí yesterday, but a search for one of my main surnames (Nieto) did not bring up any results.

The FamilySearch announcement describes “…over 63 million new Mexico historic records published this week” whereas Ancestry’s 2015 announcement described “More than 220 million searchable historical records…” published.⁴ So it looks like last week’s collection release by FamilySearch is just the first stage.

Patience, right? This means we have to be patient for the entire collection to come available.

Sources Cited