[BUG?] Source Linker "Compare" View hides relevant info compared to "Details" view
Source Linker page I was on:
When linking a Church of England Parish record (Baptism) to a person that already has a Christening date, if I click "Details" in the upper-right of the person (Charles Fearn K4R7-9HT in this case), I can see the Baptism from the new record on the left and the Christening date in the existing person on the right, as expected.
However, if I click "Compare" first instead, the Christening date on the existing person (Charles Fearn K4R7-9HT) is completely hidden.
Because of this, if I hadn't clicked "Details" first, I would have missed that the existing person already has a Christening date and that it matches; I would have decided to leave the records unlinked until more information could prove they were the same person.
I feel like the Baptism and Christening dates in the "Compare" view should both appear so you can, well, compare them.
(The "Suggest an Idea" page said to put bugs and feedback in this General Questions page, so hopefully this is the right place.)
Answers
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Interesting ... I think the reason it has Compare instead of a paper clip (meaning the record is already linked) is because the record/Details already linked/input have Christening instead of Baptism. If the two were recognized as equivalent then I would think the sources would have the same terminology. Notice how there are 3 indexes attached as Sources for Christening - they probably each refer to the same record - but compiled different/multiple times. So maybe it just isn't seeing a Baptism record to Compare to though there are two Christening records? I don't know ...
As Gordon mentions below - apparently Baptism event is a predefined Custom Event and not equivalent to Christening/Birth - Vital events. It would be interesting to know if this sort of covers the BirthLikeDate you see in Search query parameters (if defined that way for each collection - not all Baptism may be birthlikedate).
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Thanks for posting this. I had not noticed this and have been a bit annoyed that the christening date did not show, particularly because, as you probably have already noticed, if you move over the baptism, it goes into the Other Information section, not the Vitals section. Then you have a duplicate event with duplicate date and place and need to go and delete the baptism that was just moved over.
A big difference I see in your images, is that if you pick details, you see information in the Vitals section (i.e. birth and christening). If you click compare you see information in the Other Information section (i.e. all the residence information). It would be nice if all information showed no matter which you clicked.
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I have long requested that, during the indexing process, all such events are indexed as christenings, as in 99% of cases they refer to the same thing as a baptism. The usual set reply is that "we have to follow project instructions", to which my response is to please not have an instruction to index as a baptism if the event is a christening!
I'm afraid the folks / managers in Indexing just don't take into account the "further down the line" consequences of some of their instructions - notably, in this case, where one record gets assigned as a custom event and the other as a vital one, whereas - in reality - there is absolutely no difference in the nature of the actual event.
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Note that baptism-versus-christening is not an indexing error: no indexing project gives the indexers a choice between these synonyms. One or the other word is chosen (probably randomly) during project setup, and all further processes inherit that choice and all of its consequences, often decades later. (Keep in mind that this vocabulary choice is unique to English: all other European languages -- including Latin, used in a great many church records from all countries -- have just one word for an infant's initiatory rite.)
Given that most of my ancestors are unindexed Lutherans in Hungary, I don't have as much experience with Source Linker as some other people here, but I have noticed that it doesn't show everything in the Vitals box when you need it to. Thus, it's very easy to accidentally end up with a christening duplicated as a baptism. It's also possible to end up with a death duplicated as a "death registration" or similar, so the baptism/christening nonsense is only peripherally relevant here. My general solution is to not transfer anything using Source Linker, except for birth or death -- which are seldom available, because those fields are usually already filled, and SL is set up to only add info, not to replace it.
Source Linker is pretty old programming at this point. I dread what will happen when they get around to updating it, but this lack of transparency is one of the areas that need to be addressed.
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Sorry for blaming the problem onto "Indexing", when it definitely appears the assignment of the event - as a baptism or christening - does take place later on in the process (of adding these records to the database). The issue is clearly noticeable (as Julia mentions) when a record had been indexed more than once, whereby I have found (say) there can be four different records relating to my relative: two being shown as baptisms (Custom event) and two as christenings (Vital event). If this inconsistency could be eliminated, the type of problem being reported here should not arise in future.
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