Suggestions for Improvement / Errors

MartinaCW

1. When I link a baptism record, it doesn't appear at the top under "Christening" but under Events / Custom Events as "Baptism." Proposed solutions: either display it directly under Christening, or provide the option to choose the exact categorization during linking.
2. Submitting new locations should be more easily accessible, preferably at the top right via the icon menu.
3. Godparents should have an assignment indicating whether they are the first or second godparent, for baptism, confirmation, or other events.
4. There should be an option to assign the priest/minister specifically to each event, such as baptism, wedding, funeral, anointing of the sick, etc.
5. For birth records, it should be possible to specify the attending doctor or midwife, as well as the time of birth.
6. Name variations should be taken into account in the search function.

That's it for now; perhaps I'll think of more later.

Adrian Bruce1

@MartinaCW said

... When I link a baptism record, it doesn't appear at the top under "Christening" but under Events / Custom Events as "Baptism." ...

Unfortunately, we've been round this innumerable times and can get no satisfaction. It appears the powers that be are convinced that Christening and Baptism are two different things, despite the fact that if you use Google Translate on them, the two English words translate to the same single word in any language anyone has tried.

If I recall correctly, the IGI mapped everything to Christening so (if my memory is correct) I have no idea why the change.

No-one has ever answered my challenge to define the difference in a useful way. Sigh...

Julia Szent-Györgyi

Going backwards:

Name variations _are_ taken into account by the search function. In fact, for searching purposes, the names under Other Information are treated exactly the same as the name in Vitals. Or are you talking about things like listing Johannes as a match to Johann? It does some of that, too. As a test, I searched for "Johann Kovács", and got Joannes, Joannis, János, and even a Johanna.

You're free to enter the time of birth and the midwife, for example in the reason box for the birth, or as a custom fact. I'm not sure what genealogical purpose it would serve, though.

As the granddaughter of a minister, I am utterly baffled by your desire to record the officiant, but again, you're free to do so, in several ways.

I have a set of great-grandparents who had six godparents each, and one 3ggf had fifteen people listed as godparents on his baptismal record. In contrast, my spouse has ancestors from areas where it was customary to have just one. In the places and times where two was the usual number, there is no differentiation between them, other than one of them being listed first, because basic physics. Of course, you're free to add further information in a relationship note, although -- like everything to do with relationships on FS -- it'll be a tad hidden.

There's a reason that suggesting a new place is only available from the Places tool: chances are pretty high that the place is actually already there, just not labeled in a way that's showing up as a match to what you typed. I do agree that better access to the Places tool would be good, though.

FS's refusal to admit that baptism is Exactly The Same Thing as christening is a long-standing and much-debated shortcoming. The problem is, the LDS religion is highly Anglo-centric, and has assigned different meanings to some of the overabundance of English vocabulary. In their world, baptism is a completely different rite from christening. Unfortunately, they apply this distinction universally, even though it is false 99.9999% of the time, in the rest of the world. (English is basically unique in having two different words for baptism/christening.) I do not think there is a way to convince them of the error of their ways, in this.