Which Books Are Indexed

Everything this archive plans depends on one question: can this book be searched, or must it be read? A parish with an index turns four brick walls into four lookups in an afternoon. A parish without one turns the same four into a week in front of a microfilm.

So the table below is not a convenience. It is the thing that decides where the effort goes — and it has been wrong twice, both times in a direction that would have cost a sitting.

What can be searched

What cannot

These returned nothing — first under two surnames each, then again under a probe that names no surname at all. That second test is what makes them zeros rather than gaps.

This table has been wrong twice, and both are worth keeping

First it said the index was a baptism index. In capitals: «across every parish this archive uses, the index is a BAPTISM index — not one parish marriage register and no parish death register before 1891 is indexed anywhere». That was disproved within the hour by a single query narrowed to a date range. Senj marriages and Senj deaths are both indexed. They had been sitting behind a query that was too broad to show them.

The search returns a ranked, capped result set. When a parish holds several collections, a broad query returns the best-ranked ones and the others do not appear at all. They are not absent. They are below the cut. Narrow by date and they appear.

Then it said seven parishes held nothing, every zero produced by naming two surnames. Hours later a baptism turned up at Karlobag filed under «Piberich» — a form occurring exactly once in the whole parish, because it is one clerk's reading of one hand rather than a name anybody bore. If a surname can hide a person, it can hide a parish. Re-probed by place alone, three of the seven were wrong: Bribir had eighty-odd indexed deaths, Selce five baptisms, Ledenice four entries. The Selce row indicted its own method — it recorded its zero «under Antić», and one of the entries it had missed is «Margaritam Antich».

Two instruments, and neither is trustworthy alone

By surname — what every earlier pass used. It finds a family when the clerk wrote the name the way you expect, and it is silent when he did not. No list of guesses ever contains «Piberich».

By place alone — q.anyPlace plus a date window, naming no surname, counting only the rows whose returned place string matches. This is what corrected three of the zeros.

And a «Deaths» collection is often not a register. Croatia, Lika-Senj, Deaths, from 1500 to 2024 is the Find a Grave index — gravestones this archive already holds on the stones page — sitting in the results looking exactly like a parish death register. It is not counted above.

Where the indexes start and stop

Karlobag reaches 1733, and nowhere else reaches the eighteenth century at all. That single fact is why four of this archive's brick walls became lookups.

Otočac runs 1830–1858 and stops. Measured by place census: nothing before 1800, one stray at Dabar in 1816, then 83 entries for births 1830–34, 200 for 1835–37, 200 for 1855–59 — and zero for 1860–64, 1865–69, 1870–74 and 1875–79. That is the filmed book, Otočac baptisms 1834–1858, and nothing after it — though the index begins four years earlier than the film.

Senj births stop at 1894, which is what puts two of the open questions out of reach and why the letter to the parish was written.

Measured 20 September 2026. The table is kept in sources/familysearch/indexed.psv and built by tools/indexcoverage.py. The work list this decides →