The Loss of Available Records

Back in February 2016, I wrote about a marriage record between Francisco Calles and Jesus Campuzano, a daughter of my 3rd-great-grandfather Vicente Antonio Campuzano. The image of the marriage record was from the Mexican Catholic Church records from Hermosillo, Sonora, as digitized by FamilySearch. I am very lucky that I took a screen shot of that record at the time, because it is no longer available online.

Source: FamilySearch. Photo taken 5 February 2018.

 
According to FamilySearch, to view the image one either needs to sign into FamilySearch as a member of the LDS Church or view the page while at a family history center. Neither of these options are very useful to me, and likely to other family historians. It also appears that FamilySearch has pulled down the ability to view the record on Ancestry, as seen in the screen shot below:

Source: Ancestry. Image 557 of Mexico, Select Church Records.

I submitted a question to FamilySearch asking about the loss of these records. Here's the response that I received: "We understand your frustration.  You may not realize that FamilySearch does not own the records. We negotiate with the Record Custodians to try to provide as much access as possible to the records.  But they determine to whom, when and where the record images can be made available.  Often those terms change when a new contract is required. 
  We have attached a statement that explains this more fully.    We apologize for the inconvenience." The statement referenced in the response doesn't help. It appears FamilySearch had a contract for digitizing the Mexican Catholic Church records, allowing them to be published on the FamilySearch website and also viewable and indexed by third-parties such as Ancestry, but the contact has either expired or the ability to display the records online has been terminated. This is very unfortunate for researchers and historians. 

I hope someone raises this at Rootstech, which is coming up at the end of February and first week of March. Other Mexican civil records are still viewable on Ancestry, so it is curious as to why the Catholic Church records are no longer viewable online.