This is a busy & fast-moving list where subjects have a very short half-life, & I'm having problems keeping up with it all. The following topics are now a bit old, but may be still of some interest. Baptisms In 1538 Anglican parish churches in England were ordered to keep a record of all their baptisms, marriages & burials, a requirement which continues to this day. Very few churches have a complete collection of registers, & most of the surviving ones are now in the relevant County Record Office archives, where they can be freely read in microfiche format. Many of these registers have been transcribed by the LDS Church & made available as the IGI, where for some reason, the baptisms are referred to as christenings. The microfiches also use christening rather than baptism in order that their contents can be identified by a single letter - CMB is more positive than BMB. Initially all this information was written in Latin in a single register with parchment pages, usually very untidily, but over time, separate printed registers were introduced. The baptismal information recorded also changed with time: at first, only the date, the child's forenames & its father's name were given, but later the mother's name was given, & later still the father's occupation, with his village if he was from outside the parish. The IGI & www.familysearch.org omit the occupation, which with the limited number of single forenames commonly used is often the only way to identify the correct George Smith (for example) out of several men so- named. I do use both these sources, but I mark their data as 'questionable' until I've checked the original parish register. Terminology The baptism of one of my earliest known ancestors is recorded as 'March 27, 1778, Hatfield, William, son of Elizabeth Hatfield.' This is quite a neutral entry, but the absence of a father implies that William was born out of wedlock. Many such entries are more pointed, & some are brutal - it seems to depend on the attitude of the parish clerk. The entry could have said '...Elizabeth Hatfield, spinster', or '... William Hatfield, base-born son of Elizabeth Hatfield' or even '... William Hatfield, bastard son of Elizabeth Hatfield'. My practice is to include all the information in the parish register as a note in FO, together with the source, assessed as 'prime'. Arthur Thomas Hampshire, UK