Cheryl, Sorry to have been confused by your post. Thanks for pointing out which part you meant and which part you didn't. Just to be sure, you do think we should record parish names?

All Just giving my view here as a UK researcher being "doing" it for the past 40+ years !.... You MUST if at all possible give the Parish .... That's the way you find Baptisms, Marriages and Burials in UK Church records. NB you will not specifically find Births or Deaths in Parish records, the dates of birth or death maybe noted in a Baptism or burial record but will not be a specific entry. You need to understand that Parish boundaries had NO relationship to villages or towns. A town or village might lie in more than one parish. (Ex - Oakamoor in north staffs ... a village of about 500 people lies in 3 parishes) The only thing about parishes is they did NOT stray across county boundaries. The only exception to that is METHODIST records which are recorded in Circuits rather than Parishes and Methodist Circuits can stray across county boundaries. Remember that Register Office marriages (from 1837) are ONLY recorded in the Registrar's Office books and will NOT be found in any church records. Also at certain times large parishes were split up into smaller ones and called by other names. Hope this helps ! Regards Bill -----Original Message----- From: gencmp-bounces@rootsweb.com [mailto:gencmp-bounces@rootsweb.com] On Behalf Of Tom Wetmore Sent: 28 September 2012 03:07 To: gencmp@rootsweb.com Cc: gencmp@rootsweb.com Subject: Re: Entering place names, deja-vu all over again Cheryl, Sorry to have been confused by your post. Thanks for pointing out which part you meant and which part you didn't. Just to be sure, you do think we should record parish names? ------------------------------- To unsubscribe from the list, please send an email to GENCMP-request@rootsweb.com with the word 'unsubscribe' without the quotes in the subject and the body of the message

Tom Wetmore wrote: > Cheryl, Sorry to have been confused by your post. Thanks for pointing out which part you meant and which part you didn't. Just to be sure, you do think we should record parish names? For clarity: Let's agree on what the argument is about first. There is a difference between recording a fact at all and designating where it is to be recorded. IF you have a church parish, and IF you know whether that particular record is from a Catholic, CofE, or Lutheran parish, it's useful to know in the future, so yes, it should be recorded and kept. I disagree that it should merit a spot in the PLACE-NAME slot of any program. IF you insist on putting it in the Place-name slot, then all I asked was that you include the word Parish after the parish name, so the casual reader could tell whether he was looking at (or for) a town, a parish, a district, a county, or a chimera. If it makes you feel any better (probably won't), I have the same testy reaction to a record that tells me the place is Willing township, Massachusetts. This requires the reader first to ascertain whether this is a unique identifier (it isn't), then to determine which of the possible Willing twps it might reference. By contrast, "Whitmore County Massachusetts" IS a unique identifier -- there is only one...and finding the townships within a county is a whale of a lot faster than finding the counties that have a specific township. [N.B.: place names in THIS post are fictional and do not, AFAIK, exist in reality.] Just as some fixate on townships, some fixate on the parish name. This is fine so long as those so-fixated never attempt to communicate in any way with someone fixated on the other or on some 3rd system. But, RECORDING something and including it in (specific field) are separate issues. So, to answer the question: Yes, I favor /recording/ it; No, I do not favor /including/ it in the place-name field because putting it there clouds communication. Cheryl