Why has a "race" box/field been added to England UK search forms?

LegacyUser

Koromo said: Why has a "race" box/field been added to the search forms for England (UK) Baptisms, Marriages and Burials?

Information about someone's ethnicity has NEVER been requested by the Church of England — many people would be offended by such a request.

LegacyUser

Randy Hoffman said: If you leave all of the fields blank, and search just by race, you get results. When you click on them, you can see that race was indexed, so it was requested and recorded.

Considering the time frame of that collection, I don't find it hard to believe that the official state church would ask those sorts of questions.

LegacyUser

Koromo said: I beg to differ. The Church of England did not ask what the "race" of their congregation was.

Choosing the "race" as Hindu in the England Baptisms, there are precisely 2 entries out of your supposed 69,083,664 records; one in 1795 and the other in 1841, both of which were marginal notes probably written by the vicar or church warden.

Choosing the "race" as Black, there are 399 results out of 69+ million. As an example, there is a Henry Affey baptised on 9 September 1785 at St Thomas' Liverpool. As you will see from the attached image, his ethnicity was not asked for. That particular vicar for some reason felt compelled to note that he was Black.

You don't see the other 69,083,265 records with "race" entered as White.

LegacyUser

Randy Hoffman said: There were also over 100,000 recorded as white. For whatever reason, the information was recorded. I don't think it matters whether the Church asked for it to be recorded, or a few vicars decided to do it themselves. Since the information is there, I think it would be a mistake to not include it in the index, if there is any chance it could help someone in their search.

I also don't think there is anything wrong with race being included on a record. Just because the color of someone's skin was noted doesn't mean they were being discriminated against. If someones finds this offensive, I have plenty more examples of far more offensive and scandalous information in records.

LegacyUser

robertkehrer said: We have removed the Race search field.

The presence of this field was data driven and present because some of the records have this data. There are, as this collection demonstrates, instances where only a very small % of the records have data.

For these collections the presence of such a field probably has very little value, can be mis-leading and, as Koromo points out, can be sometimes be borderline offensive.

It won't always be easy to determine if a field should be hidden, but we made that decision for this one.

-Robert

LegacyUser

Koromo said: The pre-printed parish registers for marriages from 1813 do not ask what "race" a bride or groom is nor is there a space to write such information. So many of the England marriages for which your records attempted to acscribe a "race" were just plain wrong, ranging from a bridegroom in 1873 who was labelled as black because your transcriber mis-read his occupation of clerk, to a bride in 1715 being entered as white because she lived in Whitechapel Road!

Thank you for removing such awful errors from sight.

K.

LegacyUser

Dorothy Franks said: I'm researching my "BLACK" ancestors and this field is very important to me even if my ancestor was the ONLY person recorded as so. I disagree with you. Please add the RACE field back to the search engine! This information should be made available.

LegacyUser

Dorothy Franks said: There were mixed race marriages as there are today. The RACE field is very important to those of us of color. It's shameful if we don't want to own or face the facts as to what RACE our ancestors are. It is RACIST ACT not to include the RACE field.

LegacyUser

Dorothy Franks said: Please!

LegacyUser

Emily Oldroyd said: I am over the creation of UK indexing projects and help to manage existing collections for the UK on FamilySearch. Hopefully I can clarify a little here, in earlier parish registers there were no printed forms, they were just logged according to the preference of the priest with varying information. The indexing data for this collection does contain data on a person's race in some cases but it is not a common field in the printed forms. This particular collection on FamilySearch contains more than just Church of England parish registers. Another point to consider is that this collection contains many different non-conformist registers as well, all of which differ widely in what they recorded. This particular collection is one of the oldest index collections on FamilySearch. We are working on adding better citations and image links (where possible) to it so that a record can link back to the original image and therefore shed more light on the data we've indexed and made available. Hope this helps.

LegacyUser

Emily Oldroyd said: I am over the creation of UK indexing projects and help to manage existing collections for the UK on FamilySearch. Hopefully, I can clarify a little here, this particular collection is one of the oldest index collections on FamilySearch. It was created a long time ago from church records from a lot of religions over England all of which contained varying information over the years. It was one of the first collections published to our website and contains a lot of great content as well as a lot of errors. We have not removed this collection from our website because many people have attached the records from it to their tree. We are however working on analyzing the data with the intent to improve it where we can. This is a long process because it is such a large collection and because we don’t want to cause new errors due to additional treatment of the data.
In the case mentioned above, you are right, the race is not mentioned on this particular record for Thomas. I am not sure why it is in the data but like the rest of the collection this will be looked into and eventually sorted out. In regards to the issues with event place, this is a problem that came up with the creation of our new locality tool which is helping us to standardize and hint. We are working on fixing the localities that got mixed up when this tool was implemented. For your information, we generally do not index race or locality in our more recent UK projects. Thanks for the feedback, hopefully this helps. We appreciate your patience.