Baptism and Christening Tab

CSAndrews

Serious problem. Baptisms are not going into Christening tab. This leaves the Christening tab blank. No temple work can be done with blank christening and birth tabs. When is this going to be fixed? I have already gotten feedback from Family Search that they can't combine Baptism and Christening records because some are infant baptisms and some are adult baptisms. This is not a solution. The problem still exists. All researchers have to manually add the baptism dates in the christening tab or leave it blank. This is VERY time consuming. I would appreciate this problem being addressed on a higher level with the top technicians. It is a big problem that needs to be resolved. So many researchers have complained about this and still nothing is resolved. It is ignored. I think FamilySearch can do better than this.  

Paul W

@CSAndrews

I have been asking for quite some time that all "Baptisms" are treated as "Christenings". Exactly the same thing - well, at least 99% of the time with FamilySearch records. I'm reliably informed this is nothing to do with the actual indexing of the events (where they are indexed as the same event), but happens at the stage where the sources are created, ready to be put online and attached to Family Tree IDs. For some reason, there is an inconsistent process, whereby some records are treated as Baptisms (meaning they become Custom Events when carried across to an ID) and others as Christenings (whereby they go straight to the Vitals section).

Sadly, there is no way of communicating with whoever manages the section of FamilySearch where this work is carried out. A number of other users have complained about this arbitrary differentiating between an identical event, but no one takes any notice and the problem remains ongoing.

(Obviously an adult baptism would be another issue, but I have never encountered such records in my ten years of working with FamilySearch - just this annoying treatment of infant baptisms / christenings.)

Julia Szent-Györgyi

The "but but but adult baptisms!" excuse doesn't hold up at all under scrutiny. An initiatory rite can be for an infant or an adult regardless of the choice of label applied. The fact is, more than 99% of church records for said rites are for infants, but calling it a christening doesn't prevent it from being an adult conversion, just as calling it a baptism doesn't make it any less likely to be for a newborn.

In every language besides English, baptism and christening are Exactly The Same Thing, because there's only one word for it. Even in English, the two words are used completely interchangeably -- by everyone except the Mormons. Therein lies the problem. Because the LDS church uses these two words for very different rites, its members cannot conceive just how nonsensical their objection is in the rest of the world. So I don't expect this to change any time soon: FS will continue to sputter "but! but! adult!" whenever the equivalence is mentioned, and we'll all be stuck manually transferring things into the correct boxes.