Christening data
On the new person page, I see no option to enter christening data so I continue to use the old version. I am in the midst of Czech research using Catholic church records and I don't want to enter a baptism date in the birth field!
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Hmm? The Christening field is still there in the Vitals box. Perhaps you didn't notice that there's now a second column?
(The baptism date is frequently identical to the birthdate. Or it's the only date that will ever be available, because the register recorded only the sacrament, not the vital event. So there's really nothing wrong with entering a baptism in the birth field. But you don't need to.)
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s soon as I posted this, I found the christening field -- I was looking in the wrong place for it!
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I assume by commenting, "The baptism date is frequently identical to the birthdate", you are talking specifically about Czech records. This is probably rarely the case with U.K. records, when a child was usually only baptised on the day of birth if it looked as if they were unlikely to survive.
Obviously, there is another situation, whereby the baptism date has been indexed as the birthdate in error.
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@Paul W, I've only looked at a few specifically Czech records, but in my experience, continental European baptismal registers -- once they start recording both birth and baptism -- are typically about half "day of".
Random page from random Catholic church: https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/3:1:9Q97-YSY6-SK3?i=399&cc=1743180&cat=427391. Out of 10 entries, 5 have the same day for birth and baptism, and the furthest apart is four days (Dec. 7 vs. 11, 1864).
When it's a fact of life that babies die, and people believe that the unbaptized cannot get into Heaven, then baptism does not get put off.
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In England, especially in the registers for Norfolk, it is common to find a "private baptism", which appears to have taken place in the home of the newly-born child - and a later event recorded (when the child survived!) for the formal church baptism. With some registers, it is impossible to tell if the birth / baptism dates are the same, but many are quite clear in showing the two dates - which can be weeks, even months, apart.
Surprisingly, the birth date can be found less frequently from 1813, when a new, printed page was introduced. There being no place for the birth date, it was sometimes added in the space to the left side of the baptism date.
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With apologies to the original poster for drifting somewhat off-topic, this is an illustration of the typical content of pages from a Gateshead, County Durham register. From 1813 there is no place for birth detail to be shown and the quality of the data was generally far poorer than (especially) for the 1798-1812 period:
Pre 1813 typical page presentation
Post-1812 there was much sparser detail - not even any birth dates in this example, though sometimes they were added to the left of the baptism date
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Just tried again to upload the images that have disappeared - seems the problem of them not sticking permanently continues here.
Had another go (90 minutes after the last try) using a suggested copy/paste instead of upload. Will check later to see if that has solved the problem.
Many thanks @Áine Ní Donnghaile in helping me to get these images to stick.
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Wow, that 1802 page has birth-to-baptism intervals that aren't seen in Austria-Hungary until the 20th century, if then. (People were more likely to not get baptized at all than to have the rite seven months after birth.)
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Yes, I thought it might illustrate how - from our respective work with records of different countries - we can develop a different viewpoint on issues, as illustrated here.
BTW - this was fairly exceptional, even for England. The Bishop of Durham issued a decree for baptism registers of churches under his jurisdiction to be kept in this manner. Sadly, this only covered the 1798-1812 period, after which records throughout England were ordered (I forget by whom) to be recorded on set, printed forms - the one for baptisms being illustrated above. The "3rd son" or "4th daughter" detail has proved invaluable in finding other siblings / children of those concerned. And the "Native of..." bit usually turns out to be the place of baptism of a / the parent(s) of the child.
(With apologies again to Luana for wandering so far off-topic.)
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