Navigating Dominican Republic’s Archive Website ~ Archivo General de la Nacion – Part 7 – Reference Catalog

The Reference Catalogs or Catalogos de Referencia which appears the second from the bottom on the menu is a nice way of gaining access to books and documents.  When you click on the link it will lead to a new page and provide you with the view I have provide below.  Notice the error message on the page (see green box).  Basically it is saying it can’t find the page. I know a few people who have skip this site believing that it doesn’t work. The truth is that whatever is suppose to appear in that area is what is missing and nothing else. Notice the menu on the side. There is a total of 460 documents available for anyone to view.  I found some of my ancestors referenced in this archive and this was by far the best way to gain access to them.

You can click on any year. The year represents when the documents have become available online. So in look at this menu, you can see that 28 items have become available to the public to view.

So in my example I clicked on 2011 to gain access to the documents. Notice that the view to the right changes and provides you a list of documents or books that were digitally made available. You cna do this with any of the years on the side menu.

The very first item on the 2011 list, “La Colonization de la Frontera Dominicana 1680 – 1785” translates to “The Colonization of the Dominican Frontier 1680 – 1785” and it also provides you the author of the book which is Manuel Vicente Hernandez Gonzalez.

The most you can do here is write down the information about the book. Clicking on it will not open the book. I repeat, clicking on it will not open the book!  This is basically an index that you can use to gain access to the documents by visiting the books link I mention on an earlier post.  You can find the entire collection of Dominican Republic postings on a page I setup for easy navigation by clicking here.  This link is useful simply to get a quick view of the titles of books thereby reducing the amount of time you spend trying to figure out where to find a particular book.