Add Godparent/Witness fields
Regarding the below film (and hundreds of others like it) you have not given the ability to add additional fields for godparents/witnesses. Often these birth/baptism records list godparents... sometimes with embedded marriage records, such as in this case:
Godparents: Adamus Kusz, adolescent and Regina the wife of Bartholomaei Becela of the village of Presdio Mataysak.
I think the community would be well served to be able to search on those fields, if you would add them.
Digital Folder Number
008026820Image Number
10
Collection Information
Deutschland, Preußen, Posen, Katholische und Lutherisch Kirchenbücher, 1430-1998
Learn more about this collection through the FamilySearch Wiki.
Cite This Record
"Deutschland, Preußen, Posen, Katholische und Lutherisch Kirchenbücher, 1430-1998", , FamilySearch (https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:6FZS-YJ45 : Wed Nov 22 20:40:10 UTC 2023), Entry for Magdalena Kusz and Isidori Husz.
Comments
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@RussellWilkins That would require a re-indexing of 1000s of films/DGS. The details were not captured when the records were indexed by volunteers over many years. That would mean all the work, plus more, would need to be repeated.
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There are a few indexes that include things like the officiant or the midwife, and they're highly annoying, because it means that nearly 100% of the resulting sources have unfinished attachments. The proportion would be somewhat lower for witnesses or godparents, but in my experience, it would still be well above half: even if the witness or godparent is a relative, the marriage or baptism record never identifies the relationship, since that's not relevant to the event being recorded.
Creating an index involves tradeoffs between speed and content: more fields slow down the indexing and use more resources once the index is published. I think the usual practice, of sticking to the principals and their immediate relatives, results in a useful finding aid using a reasonable amount of time and resources.
If you can identify the godparents or witnesses, you can attach the event record to their profiles, independently of how the image was indexed. There are several ways of doing so on FamilySearch's Family Tree, such as the Source Box button on the image, or "Add New Source" on a profile's Sources tab.
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