Understanding the Catholic Roots Mormon Harvest Project
The Catholic Roots Mormon Harvest project is essentially a massive genealogical data collection effort organized through Latter-day Saint church programs. It focuses on extracting Catholic parish records from repositories across Europe and Latin America and preparing them for submission to the Family History Library in Salt Lake City. The harvest model means missionaries and volunteers go into specific geographic areas, digitize or index records from Catholic parishes, diocesan archives, and civil registries, then return those records for inclusion in the broader genealogical database. Eric Shuster has been involved in coordinating and participating in these harvest projects over the years. His work relates primarily to the organizational and technical side — managing which parishes get targeted, overseeing the scanning and indexing workflow, and dealing with the logistics of getting materials back to Utah. He has also been active in the genealogy forums and communities where harvest results and preparation advice get discussed. Here is how the actual process works when you are trying to prepare for or use harvest data. First, you need to identify what is available. The FamilySearch catalog is the starting point. Go to familysearch.org and search by locality — county, then town or parish. If a harvest has already happened there, you will see collections like "Spain, Catholic Parish Records, 1619-1970" or similar entries that list the parishes covered. These are not always complete. A harvest might cover only the first two decades of a particular parish's records, or only the sacramental registers for baptism and marriage without confirmation or burial entries.
When I was preparing materials for a Central American harvest several years ago, one of the problems I ran into was that the local parish priests had never indexed their own records. They kept everything in bound logbooks with handwriting that ranged from legible to practically indecipherable. The harvest team needed to know exactly what years and what sacrament types were available before committing to scan anything. My workaround was to send a small group ahead just to do an inventory — a page-by-page walkthrough of each book, noting dates, sacraments covered, and condition. We photographed the table of contents pages first, then did a sampling of random pages to assess handwriting quality. This saved us from showing up with equipment only to find the books were water-damaged or completely illegible. That inventory step alone took about three days for a mid-sized parish, but it prevented maybe two full days of wasted scanning time later. On the technical side, the standard setup involves a decent camera — preferably a DSLR or mirrorless with a macro capability — a copy stand or adjustable mounting rig, and a neutral background. The lighting needs to be consistent. Natural light from a single window works fine if you control the glare with a sheer curtain or reflector. The target resolution is typically 300 to 400 DPI for the final scans, and filenames should follow a consistent convention that matches the parish and book numbering system. Some teams use software like PhotoScan or dedicated parish record scanning apps to batch process and auto-name files. I have used both approaches and honestly prefer the manual method for older records because the software sometimes misidentifies page breaks or merges two separate images together. One thing people routinely get wrong is the assumption that digitizing the records is the hard part. It is not. The hard part is making the records searchable and usable afterward. A batch of 500 scanned images means nothing if they are not indexed with proper fields for given name, surname, date, parent names, and source citation. The FamilySearch indexing system has specific field requirements that vary by record type. A baptism record asks for different data points than a marriage bannum entry. I have seen entire harvest submissions get flagged and returned because the volunteers indexed according to their own template instead of the official FamilySearch project form. The fix is straightforward — always work from the official indexing template linked in the project instructions, and run a test batch of ten records through it before you commit to the full set.
There are also limitations to keep in mind. Not every Catholic archive participates. Some dioceses refuse access entirely on privacy grounds, particularly for records less than a hundred years old. Others will let you scan but not digitize, meaning you are restricted to note-taking or hand-transcription. In parts of Italy and Ireland, I have encountered situations where the parish priest allowed photography but explicitly forbade removing any books from the sacristy, which rules out most copy stand setups. The workaround in those cases is a handheld camera with a remote shutter trigger and a collapsible tripod, shooting at the lowest possible flash setting while maintaining a steady hand. If you are approaching this as a researcher rather than a volunteer, the main pitfall is assuming that because a collection exists in the FamilySearch catalog, it is fully searchable. A lot of harvest records are image-only at this point. They have been filmed or scanned but not fully indexed. You can still view them, but you cannot search by name unless someone has gone through the indexing step. The search results will show you film or image numbers, and you have to browse manually. This takes considerably more time than a full text search and often requires some familiarity with the language and record conventions of the region you are researching. The practical upside of harvest projects is that they bring together materials that would otherwise be inaccessible to most researchers. A small parish in rural Guatemala or a diocesan archive in southern Poland does not typically have the budget or staffing to digitize its own holdings. When a harvest team processes those records, they become available online to anyone with a FamilySearch account. The trade-off is that the quality and completeness depend heavily on the conditions on the ground and the thoroughness of the volunteer team. Your mileage will vary significantly depending on which harvest has touched your particular area of interest.
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