jrcottrell

Jane Dial Cottrell

in the Alaska Church Records, where are the confirmations recorded, would that be under the baptism date??

Thanks!!

Jane Dial Cottrell

The entire page was labeled confirmations. It ask for the age and the first entry was 40 years old.

I returned the batch as no extractable data.

Thank you for your discussion.

Julia Szent-Györgyi

I wouldn't think so, as a person's baptism and confirmation are generally anywhere from 6 to 15 years apart (or sometimes even more).

What do the project instructions say?

Cemetery Tramp

I don't think the instructions say anything about confirmations. I haven't seen a confirmation, but I would think listing it as birth/baptism/christening would be appropriate.

I'm confused as why the heading contains both words "baptism" and "christening", as they are interchangeable terms in all of the faiths that I am familiar with. But maybe that isn't true in all faiths. Does anyone know, just for my curiosity?

The Cemetery Tramp

Julia Szent-Györgyi

@Cemetery Tramp, the short version is that "baptism" and "christening" are the same word in every language besides English, and the same rite in every denomination besides LDS. However, most of the people who work for FS are LDS, and they don't realize that they're making a distinction that the rest of the country and world doesn't share.

However, the question wasn't about "christening", but about confirmation, and that is (very) distinct in every denomination that I know about. In English, Catholics mostly call it "first Communion" and do it around age 6, while most Protestants call it "confirmation" and do it in their early teens. (I was 14.)

If the indexing project's instructions don't say anything about confirmations, and the image contains nothing but confirmations, then I would suggest marking it NED.

MandyShaw1

As I understand it, and for completeness, Catholics (certainly in England) have a further separate rite called Confirmation which happens at roughly the same age as a Protestant confirmation. The difference from my Church of England perspective is that C of E people would normally wait to take their first Communion until they'd been confirmed.

erutherford

In the Catholic church, First Communion is in the 2nd grade (8 years old) and Confirmation is 8th grade (13 years old) and mostly done if the child is in parochial school. They are both huge deals within the school and parish.

Áine Ní Donnghaile

And, just to add a further wrinkle, while First Communion for Roman Catholics is often age 6-7 and Confirmation is often age 11-13, I have friends who had their First Communion and Confirmation a week apart, at age 6-7, in the 1960s, in the USA. They are distinct and separate rites.

Julia Szent-Györgyi

I'm sorry that my oversimplification turned out to be oversimplified. :-)

(For what little it's worth, the Catholics who were in Hungarian Scouts and Hungarian School with me in 1970s-80s Southern California didn't have an equivalent to the confirmation classes and rite that us heretics ::ahem, sorry, I meant:: Protestants [grin] were subjected to.)

But bringing this back to the original question: re-re-reading it, it occurs to me that perhaps it was a page of mixed records, where some were baptisms, and some were confirmations. I've since looked at the project instructions, and it simply says to "Index all records regarding a birth, marriage, or death." Since a confirmation isn't any of those things, it should not be indexed in this project.