Vital information

John K Webb

hi

in the UK various system like Ancestry use Baptism dates and Not Christening Dates so when this ends up in Family Search, FamilySearch does not recognize it as a Vital Record.

this then prevents Temple work from being done.

so you have to create a Christening event and copy the data from Baptism entry.

i recently found 300-400 individuals sat waiting for more information that all i had to do is re-enter the baptism info into the Christening field.

so the suggestion to enable Temple work is that FamilySearch starts to except Baptisms as a vital record.

Regards John Webb

Paul W

The "difference" (or otherwise) between a baptism and a christening has been much discussed previously. In the Church of England - and most other main religions in the UK - the two terms are synonymous (as apparently they are in other languages). It is a shame FamilySearch does not recognise this and index everything as a christening, so the events can go directly into the Vitals section(s).

In fact, the best reason I can think of for maintaining the term "christening" in genealogy is that the term CMB (christenings, marriages & burials), in relation to available records, is rather clearer than using "BMB".

There was another post raised here recently about FamilySearch indexing project instructions. They are so inconsistent that sometimes the exact same event is indexed as a baptism, but in other cases as a christening. This situation needs to be addressed urgently - including the reclassifying of those already indexed as baptisms so they appear as christenings in FamilySearch sources and can be moved straight into the Christening vital section (on the Person page) during the source linker process.