Baptism to be put under Christening
When adding a record to an individual, the baptism is put under Other. Why can't it be put under Christening so I don't have to copy the information again. After all the baptism is the same as a christening.
Those who do software changes, this is for you.
Comments
-
Worth another try, I suppose, but this is a long-standing request that seems to be falling on deaf ears.
One would hope that all newly indexed christenings / baptisms would be categorised as Christenings, so (when source linking) they can go straight to the Vitals section instead of under Other Information. Apparently, this is not an indexing problem as such, but the way the indexed records are treated post-indexing and before being added to the database.
Why this can't be addressed - when there have been plenty of reports of the inconvenience / annoyance this is causing users - seems quite baffling.
3 -
Christening and Baptism are birds of a feather, but there is a technical distinction. GEDCOMX, of which FamilySearch is a sponsor, has defined two different tags.
There are two issues here. One is that the tag for Baptism has not been adopted for use in FamilyTree. This is why the Baptism event goes to a custom event and doesn't easily transfer to third-party applications via the API. The second is the rigidity of the Vitals block. When the Baptism event exists, it should replace the Christening event in the Vitals block. So far, this has been a tough sale.
0 -
@Bruce Compton, you are mistaken: in the actual, real world that most of us live in, baptism and christening are exactly the same thing. In fact, in every language besides English, there is only one word for it.
An unfortunate consequence of this example of the English language's superabundance of vocabulary is that the LDS church created a distinction between these two words. Even more unfortunately, this artificial distinction is strictly adhered to by FamilySearch, the originator of the GEDCOM standard. This results in the many, many requests like this thread.
1 -
@Julia Szent-Györgyi, I do not speak every language on the planet, so I sought guidance from the oracle at Google. Searching for "christening baptism difference" shows that there really is a distinction between the two terms.
Hundreds of years of religious tradition make it difficult to conflate the two terms. Christening and Baptism are distinct events.
0 -
There are two issues here. The first relates to the "separate" definitions of "Baptism" and "Christening". When this issue arose some years ago I decided to check out some websites - mainly relating to Anglican (Church of England) and Roman Catholic churches. I had personally, previously believed that the baptism involved the sprinkling of water (we are talking about infant events here) and christening the naming (part of the) ceremony. To my surprise, of the several websites I checked, none differentiated between the events, treating the two expressions as synonymous.
I did not raise that as an issue here, however, as it is rather irrelevant when it comes to the way FamilySearch categorises these events. My experience relates purely to baptism / christening events that took place in Church of England establishments. From 1813, these are generally recorded as illustrated below: that is, in registers that have pages headed "Baptisms". In some cases FamilySearch has multiple records of the exact same event, but where I have encountered examples of, say, four records / sources of that one event, two will have been categorised as a baptism event and two as a christening event.
It is this FamilySearch practice that is the prime topic of this discussion. If (during the process of getting these records added to the database) someone decides to designate them as a "Baptism" the data will be carried across to "Other Information" on the person's profile. However, treating them as a Christening ensures the event goes directly to that field in the Vitals section on the Details page. So, the issue is one of us expecting consistency in the way these (mostly infant) events are added to the database, instead of the current practice whereby the categorisation decision appears to be taken completely arbitrarily.
Example of the material to which I am referring to in my examples / illustrations of the situation. The event is never headed Christening, but as long as FamilySearch regards them as Christenings (in relation to the Vitals heading) they really do need to be categorised as such, instead of as Baptisms:
2 -
Although, as stated, I don't think this is the real issue here, this is how the Church of England views the situation:
See https://www.churchofengland.org/life-events/christenings/christening-faqs#na
1 -
I put "baptism and christening" into Google Translate and got the same thing twice in all but 38 cases (out of 133) -- and four of those were because "christening" had been left untranslated.
1 -
What's strange is that christenings were always christenings in the indexed records until two or three years ago. It's only in the new collections that christenings have become baptisms. It seems that someone somewhere made a decision to break with past practice and change the label on these christenings for new indexes. It would be nice if that person's successor reversed that decision.
1 -
@Bruce Compton said "Hundreds of years of religious tradition make it difficult to conflate the two terms. Christening and Baptism are distinct events."
Unfortunately, most of those links are not statements from Church denominations, and many are simply not actionable, by which I mean that they say things like "One is a ceremony, the other a Sacrament" without declaring how one could stand in such a service and tell whether it was a ceremony or a Sacrament.
Taking into account @Julia Szent-Györgyi 's translation research, it would appear that the offending language is English and therefore that suggests that the Church of England ought to be the authority on the difference, if English created the two terms. The Church of England states on its website https://www.churchofengland.org/life-events/christenings/christening-faqs#na:
There is no difference between a christening service and a baptism service.
Some churches will use the word ‘baptism’ and some the word ‘christening’. The moment when your child has water poured or wiped on their head is the actual baptism and is at the heart of the service.
I notice that one or two people say things like
Christening takes place when a child is named and is also baptized at the same time
In other words, for these people, "Christening" = "Naming" plus "Baptism". This is an actionable distinction as one can look for the presence or absence of Naming. But if one looks at the Church of England services, they do include Naming, yet are titled Orders of Baptism. (There is no service of Christening). The relevant bit is the part where the priest says "NNNN I baptize thee..." - that's the naming done in one word (NNN is the child's name) immediately adjacent to the term "baptize". Hardly a dramatic difference.
The truth is that English language registers are often muddled on the use of the two terms - as @Paul W shows, the preprinted versions now refer to baptisms, but the handwritten volumes could be all over the place - I've seen pages headed "Christenings" at the top, but with the entire page referring to each child being "Baptised". I've seen pages where the two terms both appear but it's simply not possible to decide if the clerk used both terms for a bit of variety. The interesting thing is that one of the major figures in English genealogy said that, while most registers used the two terms indiscriminately, he had seen a register where he was convinced that the priest used the two terms deliberately and differently - but that it simply was not possible to work out what the meaning of the two terms was.
In summary, FamilySearch is building far too much onto this distinction - if it exists - for no benefit and is causing annoyance to its users because of it.
3 -
By the way, please do not confuse Baptism v Christening with Adult Baptism v Infant Baptism. Denominations that practice only Adult Baptism, may refer to that as a Baptism (the single word only).
1 -
Bruce wrote: "Christening and Baptism are distinct events."
Not in my world, they're not, so I'm curious: what happens at a christening, by your definition? What happens at a baptism?
(In my world, you name a Christian baby by getting it wet. There are variations on how wet, and in when it happens, and in who does what part, but it's invariably a single ceremony, which is generally called something derived from either Latin for "cross" or Greek for "dip". Ironically, Latin falls into the latter category.)
1