Take off Christening on FSFT
During a conversation with a patron on FSFT, she suggested that having the area for Christening is an offense to other religions who do not practice Christening, especially to African-American Baptists. Attempted multiple times to explain to patron that it is a blank area for people to fill in if a Christening occurred. Explained that Christening has been practiced for hundreds of years in many religions and that it is part of the FSFT blank template. If a Christening did not take place, it is left blank and has no bearing on the person's history. Advised patron that I would submit her suggestion to take off the Christening.
Comments
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I've never been sure why people are so unhappy with blank spots on forms.
When this comes up, please mention that it is very important for many people to have that Christening spot there as a stand in for Birth. For example, prior to 1815 in Norway parish registers which were the only record of births and only rarely contained birth information. They were church records so only recorded church events, that is, Christenings, Marriages, and Burials. Not births or deaths.
There have been discussions on and off here in Communities and in previous feedback forums among users as to whether the name of that field should be changed from Christening to "Infant Naming Event" to broaden its universality. That does not seem to have gotten any traction with anyone at FamilySearch. But in any event, it should never be removed.
There have also been discussions as to whether infant christenings and infant baptisms are one event or two. Some one these boards have stated that they are two separate ceremonies that occur at the same time. If you take that point of view, then an infant christening is pretty similar to a Baptist infant dedication.
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If the intent were to document religious ceremonies, there should be two fields, Christening (or more generic naming) and baptism. But it seems to be a substitute for lack of birth information, so instead there should be just one field for birth/christening with a checkbox. It is a holdover from specific religions and it ought to be updated one way or another.
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@Craig G. Smith In some cases a christening event can in a sense take the place of a birth event if there is no birth event and a christening is the only event that shows that the person was born. But it is fairly common for a christening event to happen, and yet a birth event is also documented. Sometimes the document for the christening makes note of the birth date in addition to the christening date.
There are many, many cases where a christening is definitely not "a substitute for lack of birth information." In any case, since these are distinct events, and each can have its own date/place/sources, it would not be practical to combine these two events into a single field.
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"There should be two fields, [XX] (or more generic [synonym-of-XX]) and [XX]."
"There should be two fields, Place (or more generic Location) and Place."
English simply has Too Many Words.
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We (English) do have too many words because we imported all the variations from all the languages that came together in the Melting Pot.
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Áine has given the perfect excuse to trot out the quote about English accosting other languages in dark alleys and rifling their pockets for spare vocabulary (https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/694108-the-problem-with-defending-the-purity-of-the-english-language).
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Actually English doesn't have enough words. In the Oxford English Dictionary, the definitions for the word "one," if I remembers correctly, span about eighteen large pages. No one word should have to carry that kind of a burden. And we've all seen trouble here in Communities with people miscommunicating on a topic because they are using the same word to describe a problem but each using a different meaning for the word. Let's steal more words.
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