Name of celebrant priest: best practice?
What would you advise to do with the names of officiants in, say, christening ceremonies? As an example, Cayetano Dominguez, Guacarí's Catholic priest from 1828 to 1851, shows up in almost every christening record.
Automatic indexer recognizes his name and adds it to the transcribed record.
(A)
If every name is not linked to a registered name, the record appears as incomplete.
Diligently 😅, I registered Cayetano Dominguez's name (https://www.familysearch.org/tree/person/details/GL7X-PV2) and have been linking all his appearances there, but he's reached the 200 number limit for sources.
In order for the sources not to show up as incomplete, what can be done?
Some ideas:
- leave records as "incomplete", hoping it does not affect searches (perhaps the search algorithm does not reward records with complete sources over those with incomplete ones?)
- delete instances of the officiant name in records — deleting Cayetano's name from (A).
- For future automated transcriptions, train the algorithm to ignore the priest name, (a) at least the signed name at the end of each record (b) every name in a form like
"Yo el <name name> cura propio de ella bauticé, puse oleo y crisma a …" - registering a dummy Cayetano Dominguez II, III, IV etc, each linked to 200 more sources.
What would you advise?
cc: @ScottSeegmiller
Best Answer
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I would recommend a variation on your first option and strongly advise against the other options.
- Once you have linked the record to the actual family members, you have done the essential work. You shouldn't worry about incomplete attachments. In fact, the option for dismissing the incomplete attachments warning is for situations just like this. Neither leaving the attachments incomplete not dismissing the warning will have any effect on the search algorithm.
- Do not delete the officiant from the records. He was indexed and is part of the historical record.
- Again, the officiant is part of the historical record, and should not be ignored from the record itself.
- In general, my opinion is that you should never have created the first profile for Cayetano Dominguez, and making multiple copies of the same person goes completely against one of the foundational goals of Family Tree — to have exactly one profile for each person who has lived on the earth.
The one rare exception to all this is when the officiant happens to be a close relative to the family described in the record. In that case, I would certainly recommend that the officiant be attached to the record.
Other than that, don't attach the officiant, and dismiss the incomplete attachment warning once you have attached all the family members.
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