On Wednesday 11 May 2011 16:07, Ian Goddard ([email protected]) opined: > Richard Smith wrote: >> RIF allows us to say "If a person was baptised on some date, then he >> or she was born within the previous year", but as genealogists we >> don't want rules like that. Our rules are much more fuzzy. We want >> to say "If a person was baptised on some date, then, in the absence of >> evidence to the contrary, he or she was probably born within the >> previous year". > > Hmm. I think I'd go for something along the lines of "If the statement > that a person was baptised on some date is true then that person was > born on or before that date". > > Apart from adult baptisms (not only as practiced by Baptists but also > Quakers being baptised into the CofE) there are instances such as > Benjamin Hutchinson who was baptised on his fifth birthday on 22/09/1844 > at Almondbury along with two older and two younger siblings! Just as an aside, marriages and baptisms in "frontier America" frequently depended on when the "circuit rider" made it to a place - might've been months, maybe a year, not unusually years between visits. Those itinerant preachers, together with the circuit judges were the glue that bound the isolated clusters of settlements to the nation as a whole. Bob -- Robert G. Melson | Rio Grande MicroSolutions | El Paso, Texas ----- The greatest tyrannies are always perpetrated in the name of the noblest causes -- Thomas Paine

On 05-11-2011 20:59, Bob Melson wrote: > Just as an aside, marriages and baptisms in "frontier America" frequently > depended on when the "circuit rider" made it to a place - might've been > months, maybe a year, not unusually years between visits. Those itinerant > preachers, together with the circuit judges were the glue that bound the > isolated clusters of settlements to the nation as a whole. Similarly, marriages and baptisms of French Catholics in eastern Ontario were sometimes done when a priest came across the river from Quebec. Even if you know where they lived and which Quebec church had that area, you still had to hope the priest didn't lose his notes, remembered to put them in the book, and copied them correctly. -- Wes Groleau There are two types of people in the world … http://Ideas.Lang-Learn.us/barrett?itemid=1157