How do baptisms come to get indexed as births?
I have just started working on a branch that lived in a part of England in which I had previously carried out no research. It appears every baptism (clearly headed such in the parish register) has been indexed / recorded as a birth.
Correcting the event classification is causing me a lot of unwanted effort and I am wondering if the problem relates to project instructions or (as with the christening / baptism issue that has been highlighted so many times, without FamilySearch taking any interest) if this has happened as the result of some "post-indexing" procedure.
Any advice from indexers will be appreciated: do PIs ever say to index baptisms as births and burials as deaths, etc? (They certainly didn't seem to differentiate between marriages and marriage related events in the past - but, again, maybe that was not directly an indexing issue, just the way events are classified by a FamilySearch team in the post-indexing phase.)
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Thanks for the detail, Paul.
There are no current England baptism indexing projects, to my knowledge. There are Irish Roman Catholic baptismal registers currently being indexed, and I double-checked those instructions. Those early Irish registers normally do not include a birth date, but baptisms usually occurred as soon as possible after the birth. The Irish did not have preprinted forms in the earlier years. The instructions for dates in those registers:
Index baptism or christening dates in the baptism date fields. Index birth dates in only the birth date fields.
As far as I recall, that is the standard wording for indexing projects for baptisms.
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@Paul W The first thought that comes to my mind - what is the source of the index? I know that some English (and other locations) record indexes have been imported into FamilySearch from an outside source. Have you checked the collection landing page for this record set? That might give you a clue as to the source of the indexing.
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Thanks for your response.
Here are two examples. As expected, when (just now) I found a burial record for this parish it had been indexed as a Death:
And here's the baptism record indexed as a Birth:
So, seemingly, both relate to FamilySearch indexing projects.
In case some users might think I'm being too fussy, one example I came across earlier today involved two siblings baptised at Whittlesey on the same day, but indexed as births. It transpired one had been been born some years earlier, however.
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The change history for Thomas Aveling Bedford's baptism shows everything created on 16 November 2023. However, I'm not prepared to put any money on whether that means what I hope it means. 😉
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I don't have much faith in those dates any longer.
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You will remember we recently discussed the issue of FamilySearch making changes to records - e.g., where there are "metadata issues" involved.
I don't know if reports of this type would be included in the issues you pass on to the relevant team, but this one certainly does need to be addressed. It appears to whole of the collection "England, Cambridgeshire Bishop's Transcripts 1538-1983" has been published with incorrect categorizations - in that all the Baptisms ("Christenings" in terms of FamilySearch definitions) have been shown as "Births" and all the Burials as "Deaths".
This is totally misleading and must be causing anyone using this collection a lot of grief - especially those of us adding the individual records as sources to individuals in Family Tree.
If this is within your remit, I would be most grateful if you could pass this on: surely it should not be too difficult for the appropriate team to reassign "Births" as "Christenings" (please not as "Baptisms" because then the source linker treats them as Other Information, instead of Vitals!) and all the "Deaths" as "Burials"?
From your previous comments, you seem to believe these matters are eventually addressed. From my own experience, I'm not so optimistic: especially as I still see administrators / executors of England & Wales wills indexed as "Beneficiaries", many years after this collection was published and this glaring error was notified.
I'm sure you will understand how exasperating it is to have no confidence FamilySearch will ever address such reports - especially when I find other websites (from the relatively small FreeREG / FreeBMD to Find My Past) can usually make an edit affecting one individual within a couple of weeks. With the long-outstanding FamilySearch errors we are talking about issues that can collectively affect tens / hundreds of thousands of records.
Thanking you in advance for any action you can take to see these reports are at least reaching the people who are in the position to address such matters.
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@Paul W Not something I can pass up the line. I agree that a distinction needs to be made between christenings and births as well as between deaths and burials. Probably a good item to bring up on the https://community.familysearch.org/en/categories/suggest-an-idea page.
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Thanks for your response, regardless that you are not able to help directly.
On your idea to raise this at Suggest an Idea, I probably will at some stage, but not right now as that section of Community is not functioning properly at present!
The better, general idea (which has been raised before) is for us to be provided with a dedicated address (email, or otherwise) for the team that deals with such issues. However, we would still never be sure of any resulting action being taken, as FamilySearch would doubtless still not acknowledge even receiving such reports, let alone providing any updates on fixing them!
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Just to let you know, I found the Feedback link on a Results page within the collection and have requested that, as this is a metadata error, the problem of correcting the Event titles (Burial for Death and Christening for Birth) needs to be addressed to stop many hours of users' time being spent trying to adjust these errors. (Well, only for individuals of interest to them, of course, as there appear to be hundreds of thousands of records affected by this sloppy categorization, and there's no way even a volunteer project could handle all that!
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@Paul W Excellent! Any time you see a white Feedback button on a page of concern, using it to report issues is the best route. Those reports go directly to the group that can get things fixed.
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