Why does "England and Wales Birth Registration Index, 1837-2008" still not tag the Birth event?
This has been going on since at least 2020 and FamilySearch has not, so far as I can remember, justified this oddity, which causes extra work.
The "England and Wales Birth Registration Index, 1837-2008" collection appears to set up the ability to tag the Name and a Custom Event of Birth Registration. It does not appear to tag the Birth event. (Earlier threads suggest that some index records in this collection did do this years ago.)
As a result, if I attach an index record from the "England and Wales Birth Registration Index, 1837-2008" collection to a profile, and if I bring the tag for Birth Registration across, what I have to do is go and manually tag the Birth event to the "England and Wales Birth Registration Index, 1837-2008" source, and then delete the Birth Registration event.
Why do I delete the Birth Registration event? Because it has no genealogical significance - it's implied by the fact that the child has an attached source record in the "England and Wales Birth Registration Index, 1837-2008" collection if anyone wonders whether the child has been registered or not.
In reality, of course, I don't bring the tag for Birth Registration across as part of the source attachment process, but I still have to manually tag the Birth event to this source.
I find myself deleting these redundant Birth Registration events from other profiles - and presumably tagging the Birth event to the source - though I wonder if I do manage to do that successfully because there are probably already multiple sources tagged to the Birth event from censuses, etc., so I might miss some.
To be clear:
- Births must be registered in England & Wales within six weeks;
- There is no Delayed Birth Registration facility in England & Wales, so the maximum separation between Birth and Birth Registration is six weeks (aside from a handful of cases);
- The Birth Registration index appears to be dated just by the year of registration. Therefore, every Birth Registration date will match the year of birth except, possibly, for those births in the last 6 weeks of the calendar year;
- There is no other means of recording Births in England & Wales apart from the Birth Registration process. If the Birth Registration event is not regarded as accurate enough to indicate when the Birth occurred, then there is no other means of finding the birth date other than actually buying the birth certificate in question;
If there were Delayed Birth Registrations in the "England and Wales Birth Registration Index, 1837-2008" collection, then caution would be sensible and it would make sense to create a Birth Registration event instead of a Birth event. But there aren't any such.
The current system creates pointless Birth Registration events and may result in missing tags linking the Birth event and the "England and Wales Birth Registration Index, 1837-2008" collection.
Is there any justification that I've missed? And if not, can the "England and Wales Birth Registration Index, 1837-2008" collection be altered to tag Birth, not Birth Registration?
Answers
-
I believe that Julia has posted about this concerning other record sets. The interpretation in the FSFT is very literal - a birth registration does not equal a birth. Same for a marriage registration in that is it not considered to equal a marriage.
I don't agree with the interpretation if that helps.😎
2 -
The problem is, the attachment and tagging of an index entry to a Family Tree profile is the culmination of many disparate processes run by sections of FS that basically know nothing about each other. The people who plan and run indexing projects don't have any input from the people programming Source Linker. The former decided on the "birth registration" label because, well, that's what it is. The latter haven't equated that with "birth" because in many cases, they're not equivalent. I don't know if there's a person in the middle somewhere who could reconcile those two considerations.
1 -
The other issue is that a Vital Registration Index often only presents as a reference to a quarter, meaning that the B, M, or D registered in the 1st quarter of X year could have occurred between late November of year X-1 and the end of March of year X
0 -
Seems to me that the events, facts, and consequent tagging that are meaningful for a particular collection (including accuracy limitations) should be able to be analysed at collection take-on time sufficiently to customise the way indexing, Source Linker, search, and indeed PQS work against that collection. If FS don't use their presumably in-depth understanding of their data to optimise how that data is used in practice, they're missing opportunities to improve both data quality and user experience.
0 -
Áine said:
"…The other issue is that a Vital Registration Index often only presents as a reference to a quarter, meaning that the B, M, or D registered in the 1st quarter of X year could have occurred between late November of year X-1 and the end of March of year X"
Yes - I wasn't encountering that as a major problem in the examples I dealt with, because the date was just a year and the quarter info was in a separate item. Hence for a birth registered in 1885 (say), the actual event could have occurred in the last 6 weeks of 1884, yes, but it's only the Q1 birth registrations that have that as an issue - the Q2, Q3, Q4 registrations in 1885 will all have births in 1885, i.e. there is no error.
PS I failed dismally to prefix my year with "Q4" - whenever I did, the system decided that Q4 1885 (say) standardised to April 1885 and I could not make it standardise to 1885.
1 -
To echo what Julia and Mandy said - "disparate processes run by sections of FS that basically know nothing about each other" and "If FS don't use their presumably in-depth understanding of their data to optimise how that data is used in practice…"
Well, yes. One concern with this particular case is that someone has taken onboard experiences where Birth Registrations can be massively delayed (I had some in Canada though that might just have been during the initial set-up of BMD Registration) and decided that this applies to all Birth Registrations without actually asking anyone what the rules are in this particular case, and then without assessing the risks of that decision.
0 -
I've just had a further delve because I was poised to ask a cutting question (again) about why England and Wales Birth Registration Index, 1837-2008 set up a Birth Registration event, not a Birth event, but England and Wales Death Registration Index 1837-2007 sets up a Death event.
Well, so far as I can see, the more recent index records in England and Wales Death Registration Index 1837-2007 are now setting up a Death Registration event and not a Death event. 😕
Why? Just why? The process of Death Registration in England & Wales is screwed right down - I'm not sure what the rules are for the registration itself but in practice doctors, undertakers, coroners, etc, won't move until the registration process is in play. Therefore the gap between death and registration of death is more like days than weeks.
Also - re Census records. Many of the ones that I checked have "Birth Year (Estimated) 1834" (say). These still appear to set up a Birth event but that example just creates a Birth Event with a date value of 1834 - the "estimated" bit has been lost.
Could that be a way forward? Revert England and Wales Birth Registration Index, 1837-2008 to setting up a Birth event, but standardise it as "About 1854" for a Registration in 1854?
Otherwise, many people will end up tagging birth and death events with low quality secondary sources while leaving the high quality primary sources tagging birth and death registrations. That's the risk…
2 -
Adrian, (sorry, but @mention tagging still works intermittently), might I suggest bringing up this query in the PQS group? There, the engineers seem to get to the core of why something does or doesn't work the way we expect. And, just recently, the PQS algorithm was updated to require two tagged sources for a name and a birth conclusion. There should be a vested interest in the quality of those two tagged sources.
0 -
@Adrian Bruce1
(3 attempts and I managed to get that to work!)
You Say:
Well, so far as I can see, the more recent index records in England and Wales Death Registration Index 1837-2007 are now setting up a Death Registration event and not a Death event.
But my search (as shown at https://www.familysearch.org/search/record/results?count=20&q.deathLikeDate.from=1970&q.deathLikeDate.to=1985&q.deathLikePlace=Yorkshire%2C%20England%2C%20United%20Kingdom&q.deathLikePlace.exact=on&q.givenName=charles&q.givenName.exact=on&q.surname=wright&q.surname.exact=on ) illustrates that there is inconsistency in the indexing of events as "Death" or "Death Registration" even for the same time period.
Regardless of the original point you are raising here, it is very sad that members of some of the key teams in FamilySearch appear to have no idea when it comes to differentiating between a "Death" and a "Death Registration", in a similar manner that they treat "Baptism" and "Christening" events: one gets to be a custom event and the other a vital! I'm not trying to make any direct comparison - only further illustrating Julia's point (above):
The people who plan and run indexing projects don't have any input from the people programming Source Linker.
Instead of coordinating their efforts, there are at least two teams within FamilySearch who are definitely not communicating properly with each other. And, by refusing to listen to any of the constructive advice of users, they are allowing flawed processes to continue.
2 -
Yes - I wonder if the Death Index is slowly being updated to turn Death events into Death Registration events, and this is just how we see it right now? There are lots of other index collection updates that I would prefer to see in preference to this (such as Probate Calendars being corrected to read Executors, rather than the utterly mythical Beneficiaries).
2 -
Should I tell you that a certain for-pay genealogy website has given the informant on death certificates the title of executor? Maybe a swap could be arranged?
3
