I can't find the surnames of any persons on my church record. Where are they?
Hi, my name is Dia Stock, and I'm very new to Family Search.
I just had a specific questions regarding to the Latin Church(Baptism) record I'm trying to index.
I've google translated everything, but I can't find where the surnames for anyone are. Is it possible that the surnames aren't listed at all, or am I overlooking something? Does Latin have a different wording for surname?
If I can't find anything, I'll move on to a different record, but any tips/help would be great!
Thank you.
Best Answer
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First: please don't index records that are in a language that you don't know. Well-meaning people have been doing that forever, resulting in thousands of records with "names" like "unknown" and "stillborn", along with the true doozies — like the baptism of my spouse's relative, where the father was inexplicably skipped, the mother was turned into the father, and the father's religion and occupation were turned into a mother.
Second, if you have an indexing question, it's almost always best to share the batch. Every project has its own instructions and quirks, and very few questions can be answered purely generally.
To share a batch, you can click the third button from the end on the top indexing toolbar. It has a tooltip of "Share Batch".
The resulting popup gives both a URL and a batch code; you can select and copy either one and paste it into your message here. (The Community software will be less "helpful" about the batch code. It tends to do Bad Things to URLs.)
Third, the general practice when recording names in Latin in the 18th-20th centuries was to translate the given name into Latin, and then to write the surname after it, unchanged from its vernacular form. However, depending on the context and format, the surname could be written before the given name, or there could be other words between given name and surname, or any number of other variations — same as for records written in any language, really. As for how "surname" would be labeled in Latin, that's kind of anyone's guess: classical Roman naming was completely different from the basic European models, so different people learned and used different equivalences for the Latin terms. (For example, some people used nomen for "given name" and cognomen for "surname", while other people did it exactly backwards from that.)
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Answers
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Outside sources, I.e. Google Translate, are not used in FS indexing.
The easiest things, right now, to cut your teeth on are either City Directories and Naturalization records. There are no Directory project at the moment and except for the occasional Naturilization batch, Naturalizations are review-only (you are eligible to review after indexing 1,000 batches of any project). There have not been beginner batches since late 2023/earlier this year. Most beginner projects today are AI-indexed. Keep checking back for new projects since current FS projects are on the lighter side—at least for me—right now. I'm sort of hoping it's from this weekend being Thanksgiving weekend and not FS not having projects to release.
If you're looking to index, the other three that I use are the National Archives Citizen Archivist, Billion Graves and From the Page.0 -
https://www.familysearch.org/indexing/batch/d12e5cab-d31a-48bf-8b12-7c914d7b455a
This is the link to my batch. Thank you for responding. Your comments helped.
On my batch is has a column listed as "conjugum", and I don't know what that is…
Does it even matter? Where would I find the surname on here?
Thank you very much.0 -
Conjugum is "spouse", but I don't think they're using the column for that. They appear to have combined it with the following column (headed "of village") and recorded a place or places in this column. (Several of the ones I checked were places in Zimbabwe.) But as you said, it's moot, as these are baptismal records, which have neither a spouse nor any sort of place field.
One thing they forgot to include in the project instructions for the Zimbabwe project is that many of the people don't have surnames. You'll be marking the surname fields "blank" for most of these — unless you simply return the batch for another indexer to tackle. There are records in this project that are entirely in English; it just may take a few tries to get one of those batches.
(To return a batch without indexing it, click Batch at the top left and choose "Return Batch".)
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