Source Linker creates need for additional time investment

LegacyUser

Don said: I would like to have the Source Linker improved.
Currently, the arrows will only create a Custom Event, even for vital information such as Christening information associated with birth or baptism records. Given that “baptism” and “christening” are synonymous, it is frustrating to then have to manually move the baptism information, which has been automatically entered into the Other Information section up to the Vitals section, where it belongs.

LegacyUser

Juli said: Apparently for Mormons, christening and baptism are different things, and this miniscule minority usage has been generalized on FS to the entire globe, even though most languages don't even have separate words for the two. The topic has been much discussed here on GetSatisfaction, but I don't think anybody in charge of anything has paid any attention to it.

LegacyUser

joe martel said: It probably should move it to Christening. Maybe it just hasn't been coded to understand the christening in the Person vital. I wonder if Burial works the same way? For these historical records this has nothing to do with being Mormon. 

LegacyUser

Don said: The Source Linker will recognize that birth info belongs in the Vitals section, and that death info belongs in the Vitals section, but, oddly and sadly, our Source Linker is not able to recognize that baptism info also belongs there, in the Christening field. I agree, Joe, that it just has not yet been coded to understand that baptism and christening are synonyms. Like Jull, I wonder who we need to ask to make this minor improvement?

LegacyUser

Juli said: It does, though: the people who coded the system to file "christenings" under Vitals, as a birth-adjacent event, but coded the system to file "baptisms" under Other Events, as if these things were as different as night and day, did so because in the Mormon religion, apparently they are. The problem, of course, is that for almost every other religion, they are completely synonymous, and in most languages other than English, there aren't even two different words for the concept.

LegacyUser

David Newton said: Baptism is a custom event, and christening for some weird reason is a "vital" event. Those are differently programmed and differently treated events in the system. It's not a "minor" improvement at all. It's either a (long overdue) fundamental change to the structure of the database or dealing with millions of indexed records that have been treated inconsistently.

LegacyUser

Tom Huber said: Any of the Christian denominations who do not baptize infants use the term baptism as a rule in the English language. For some languages, the term Christening and Baptism are interchangeable and refer to the same religious rite.

There are many denominations (besides The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints) who fall into this category and many are generally referred to as Anabaptist in practice. They require that a person reach adulthood before they are baptized and be capable of committing their life to living the denominations practices.

Anabaptist generally refers to re-baptizing a person and came from the practice during the early days of the reformation of the new denominations re-baptizing any person who had previously been baptized as an infant. (There are also additional practices that define the movements.)

LegacyUser

Tom Huber said: The Anabaptist denominations, along with the other adult-baptizing groups make up a significant amount of Christianity. The groups that practice Believer's Baptism, beside the Anabaptist denominations, include many evangelical groups, which makes up some 13 percent of the Christian world.

It should be noted that the evangelical movement is largely a later phenomenon that started about midway through the 18th Century, while the Anabaptist movement goes back in the late 17th Century. Both parallel the development of the Protestant movement.

Thus it isn't surprising that there is considerable confusion over which terms apply and how. Christening, used interchangeably with baptism, particularly infant baptism, in many languages, Adult baptism, even in the denominations that practice infant baptism, is seldom compared to Christening, although in those languages that do not support separate terms, I don't know what the practice involves.

Clearly, this causes major problems with recording believer's baptism in comparison to infant baptism, so that whole matter of placement in a person's record becomes one of identifying:
1) the age of the convert/professor and
2) the denomination's practices.

LegacyUser

Tom Huber said: This inconsistent treatment of the records is also a major problem, in addition to recognizing the difference between a believer's baptism and infant baptism/Christening.

The placement of Christening in the vitals section is one that should probably be moved to the "other section" because of the sheer numbers of people in those denominations who do not practice an infant baptism/Christening rite.

LegacyUser

Juli said: No, Tom, the move should be in exactly the opposite direction: 99.99% of the events labeled "baptism" in FS's databases are, in fact, infant/child rites. (Even the ones where it's a 7-year-old Jewish boy becoming Catholic.) The incidence of believer's baptism is vanishingly small, worldwide and historically.

LegacyUser

Don said: Exactly. This info is recovered from old documents that have been indexed or not indexed, but still available as images on a film in a collection of films.

LegacyUser

Juli said: Tom, most the history of Anabaptism is irrelevant to genealogy, certainly in Europe, and even in most of America. Before about the mid-20th century, these denominations were always a minority in Europe (usually a miniscule minority that didn't even show up in census tallies), and in the hit-or-miss recordkeeping of the early U.S., the exact nature of the record needs to be determined on a case-by-case basis anyway, regardless of the denomination.

Keep in mind that the separation of church and state that you and I take for granted was a highly revolutionary idea. So was freedom of religion. In pre-20th century Europe, church records were often considered to be official government records, which meant that there were requirements for belonging to an established and recognized church, regardless of one's personal beliefs. These established and recognized denominations were not Anabaptist.

LegacyUser

Roy F Hunt said: The heading in the vitals area should be changed from "Christening" to "Christening/Baptism"

LegacyUser

ATP said: Christening and Baptism records are religious events and it is my thinking they should be separated into 2 separate headings and moved to "other information" section where resides Bat Mitzvah, Bar Mitzvah, Religious Affiliation, etc. Christening and Baptism are two separate rites. For instances, one is baptized into the Baptist Church, which constitutes some 40 million members worldwide, usually sometime about their early teen years, but, never as an infant. And, the word christening is not used in Baptist doctrine.

Yes, with the creation of the United States and the Bill Of Rights, in the US, the government no longer required religious confines to record the vitals of its inhabitants, where before the English government required the Church Of England to record the vitals. By the end of World War 2, most if not all Western governments had evolved to become the entities in which the vitals are all legally recorded and in which they reside..

As an aside, it was during the reign of Henry VIII that the priests were instructed to record and keep the vitals of all its parishioners, not just the property owners. It was done rather haphazardly until about 1570 when Elizabeth I clamped down on seeing that all the vital information on all inhabitants was recorded and kept under lock and key.

To what extent those early Church of England parish registers still exist in the United States, of which a number of the earliest ones have been transcribed, they are terribly fragile and are in protected areas of usually state libraries and archives. The Church once had microfilm of a goodly number of them, and, probably still does.

For a number of years I only had a transcribed publication of a Virginia 1730 parish record. Eventually, I was able to obtain a copy of the original only to find that where the transcribed publication showed "sons" the original record showed "son". But, for the original, I'd still be looking for that second son!

LegacyUser

Roy F Hunt said: What is the genealogical purpose for the Christening date? It is a substitute for the birth date. Therefore, as far as the genealogical record goes there is no difference between the Christening of an infant and the Baptism of an infant. Either date may be used as the substitute for the birth date.

LegacyUser

ATP said: Yes, and the census' records, as well.

LegacyUser

Juli said: ATP, if you translate the statement "baptism and christening are separate rites" into any language other than English, you end up with the nonsensical statement that "X and X are separate rites". Try it in Google Translate.
English to Hungarian to English: Baptism and baptism are separate rites.
English to German to English: Baptism and baptism are separate rites.
English to Latin to English: Baptism and the Holy Baptism is a separate.
English to Latvian to English: Baptism and baptism are separate rituals.

LegacyUser

A van Helsdingen said: This very nicely demonstrates the point about baptism and christening being interchangeable.

LegacyUser

Don said: What a clever way to underscore this point for the programmers!

LegacyUser

Don said: Yes, yes, any of these records would be sufficient evidence that this person lived. Adding the baptism/christening info is not "needed" - it is just surprising that it appears that the Source Linker has added it right under the birth in the Vitals section, but instead it was added in the Other Information section. One can easily understand that Residence (from the census record) would not a Vital piece of evidence, and therefore belongs in the Other Information section.

LegacyUser

Tom Huber said: Juli, my male ancestry is Anabaptist and as such, infant baptism is not common among my ancestry, even though it is practiced among my Episcopal-Methodist female ancestral lines.

The reason I push for moving Christening to the "Other" section is that it is a religious rite that may or may not represent the person's birth. It is an old carry-over from back in the paper records era when "other" events were seldom recorded.

LegacyUser

Juli said: The need to use baptism (under any name!) as a birth proxy doesn't go away just because we are now in the habit of recording further details. In many places, once you get far enough back, the sacrament is all that was ever recorded, so baptismal dates are as close as anyone will ever get to the birthdates of those ancestors.

Of course, proxies are just one solution to the genealogical-recording framework. Another one would be a simple way to indicate less-than-or-equal-to for dates. (No, "before" doesn't quite work, because I have encountered entire pages of baptismal registers where babies were baptised on the day they were born. There's usually one baby who was an entire day old, just to show up the rest.)

LegacyUser

ATP said: Tom Huber, thanks for the explanation how Christening was carry-over from the paper records era.

How easy it would be to have all the Parish records of christenings, marriages, and deaths accessible in one distinctive local place for those of us with a long Anabaptist ancestral history. But, as a consequence of the West moving from Religious States to secular ones beginning with the American Revolution, such was not to be and as previously mentioned that evolution to the secular was not fully completed in western governments until around mid 20th century.

As it were, in my case, in the US, prior to the 1940 census, I have to depend on the largely hard to access probates of wills and inventories, estate settlements, deeds, marriages records, and census' records to source each independent vital each deposited in a different government locale. Birth certificates were the last vital document to finally be implemented in the identification of an individual, probably having to do with the creation of the Social Security Act in the 1930s. (Many people born prior to that time did not have official birth certificates, which is why, one may come across a source reference to a "affidavit of birth" on that individual.)

Further, from 1790 until 1850 census, numbers were the federal government's chief concern, which in the 1850 census a change was made that all individuals by name were included in the households. Then finally in 1880 individuals recorded in a household included their relationship to the head of the household, thus helping to more completely identify individuals and their relationships to others within their families and extended families. Hope, someday when I have all the duplicates merged and have added all the sources necessary to more fully identify my ancestors and at least their grandchildren in familysearch.org, I might research why those census' laws were changed. Is there a chance?

The various new US states also did away with a lot of wills when the states removed the primogeniture provisions from the colonial governments, since most wills prior to that were written in order to override the primogeniture provisions which gave the first born the real property inheritance. The new states then made laws that dying without a will, with exception of wife's endowment, that all children of the legal blood, or if dead and had legal progeny, equally inherited the property.

There are already signals in air as western culture has so dramatically changed over the past half century, that the laws especially regarding inheritance by blood by those dying intestate will be undergoing a very real change. If you don't wish to have the State decide the distribution of inheritance, you must have a will stipulating your wishes.

Thanks, Tom Huber, for all your input in this forum.