Implications of "England and Wales Birth Registration Index, 1837-2008" not tagging the Birth event?
I am not sure how close a fit this issue is for your group, but I believe that there are quality implications.
Background: 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.)
Similarly, the more recent index records in England and Wales Death Registration Index 1837-2007 are now setting up a Death Registration Custom Event and not a Death Event.
In both cases, the dates involved are recorded only as years (quarters may be specified but as text).
Impact: When sources are attached to a profile, some users accept the default tagging. For an index in the England and Wales Birth Registration Index, 1837-2008 collection, there is a tag against the Name (sensibly), a tag against the Custom Event Birth Registration, and no tag is generated by this process against the Birth event.
For one of these newer indexes in the England and Wales Death Registration Index 1837-2007 collection, there is a tag against the Custom Event Death Registration, and no tag is generated by this process against the Death event.
If these users then leave the situation like that, the index records that are tagged to the Birth and Death events tend to be (I believe) lower quality secondary index records such as censuses (notorious for variable ages resulting in incorrect birth years), newspapers reports (probably accurate on dates - less so on places), FindAGrave inscriptions (possibly done years after the event), etc.
The higher quality primary index records in the England and Wales Birth Registration Index, 1837-2008 and the England and Wales Death Registration Index 1837-2007 collections are then left tagged to the Custom Events Birth Registration and Death Registration. In biographical terms, these two Custom Events have, I suggest, zero significance. The 2 collections represent the only state-controlled means of sourcing accurate births and deaths.
Why was this done? I can only suspect that some people feared that Birth and Death Registrations were done at a materially different time from the actual Birth and Death events. I cannot speak for other administrations but births in England & Wales need to be registered within 6 weeks of the birth itself. There is no concept of a Delayed Registration in the English & Welsh system and never has been. I am fairly certain that deaths are even tighter in timescale simply because doctors, undertakers, parish priests, coroners, etc, won't move until the registration process is in play.
For births, the difference between registration and birth is therefore limited to a maximum of 6 weeks and since the dates are just a simple year, only births in the last 6 weeks of the calendar year may be registered in a different year from the birth year. Interpreting the Birth Registration as a Birth event therefore only affects births in the last 6 weeks of the year at worst.
Would the PQS group agree with me that using the England and Wales Birth Registration Index, 1837-2008 and the England and Wales Death Registration Index 1837-2007 collections to tag the Custom Events Birth Registration and Death Registration instead of Birth and Death events will result in a risk of lower data quality?
(Yes, I'm sure this issue will apply to other administrations as well…)
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I have been experimenting with shifting the tags for a England and Wales Birth Registration Index, 1837-2008 index record between Birth and Birth Registration. When the tag is for Birth Registration, the only other tagged source against the Birth Event is a census. The PQS therefore(?) creates the message:
"The birth only has 1 of 2 expected tagged sources."
When I shift the tag from Birth Registration to Birth, there are then two tagged sources against the Birth Event and the above "only has" message goes away.
This chap's brother has 2 census records tagging his Birth - he does not have the "only has" message to start with.
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I agree that this bug needs to be fixed. I reported this to FamilySearch quite a while ago. Maybe bringing it up again will put it on the radar :)
I can't think of any reason a birth registration shouldn't be tagged to a birth. Sure, there will always be time between the actual birth date and the registration date in any country (I've never heard of a country that requires the birth to be registered on the day it happens—usually the family has other things on their minds!). Once in a while births are registered long after the event. Regardless, they provide evidence of the actual birth.
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@kathryngz said "…Once in a while births are registered long after the event. Regardless, they provide evidence of the actual birth."
Exactly. Not just any old evidence, but the birth registration indexes are the closest in time that anyone can get without buying the certificate. Things like censuses (which are tagged to birth events!) are secondary in time, not to mention subject to drift of ages - I'm sure we've all had someone who only ever ages 8 or 9 years between censuses! Yet their (calculated) year of birth is tagged directly to the birth event whereas the index of the birth registration is tagged to a Custom Event of Birth Registration and not to the Birth Event.
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Thank you everyone for your feedback. This issue has been forwarded to the proper group for review.
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