Troubleshooting vanishing fulltext index in SQL Server 2012
Catalog and index are separate. What do you see in sys.fulltext_indexes? Did you confirm data there after the index was created?

You could check for recent Object:Deleted events in the default trace:

DECLARE @path NVARCHAR(260);

SELECT 
   @path = REVERSE(SUBSTRING(REVERSE([path]), 
   CHARINDEX(CHAR(92), REVERSE([path])), 260)) + N'log.trc'
FROM    sys.traces
WHERE   is_default = 1;

SELECT 
  LoginName,
  HostName,
  StartTime,
  ObjectName,
  TextData
FROM sys.fn_trace_gettable(@path, DEFAULT)
WHERE EventClass = 47    -- Object:Deleted
AND EventSubClass = 1
-- AND StartTime &gt; 'yyyymmdd' -- rough date/time you created the index
ORDER BY StartTime DESC;


Now, your default trace may be very busy with a lot of relevant events, in which case the drop could have rolled off the current set of trace files, but this is a rare scenario.

Another case where it might not show up in the default trace is if the database was restored to an earlier point in time - you may find some evidence of this in SQL Server's error log (though this only keeps so much history too - if you've restarted SQL Server six times, for example, any information from before that is gone).