And I will throw in New Zealand experience. Last year I obtained the New Zealand Birth Certificates for the 9 children born to my great grandfather (Tim SUGRUE from Kerry) and the 12 children born to his brother (John SUGRUE from Kerry). I then obtained all 21 Baptism records for these children and compared them to their Birth Certificates. The years spaned 1880 to 1905. In NZ parents had three months to register their children. There was a penalty to pay if the date of registration was more than three months after the birth. Therefore on occasions when it came to registering the birth, if it were more than three months after the birth, to avoid the penalty the date of birth was moved forward a couple of weeks or months to suit. Of the 21 children, 4 had baptism dates before they were born - according to the dates of birth on their Birth Certificates! As the date of registration was included on each of the certificates it was clear that these 4 particular registrations occurred more than three months after the Baptism date - hence a little porkie was told to avoid a fine. The baptism dates for the other 17 children were in every case within three weeks of the date of birth as recorded on the Birth Certificate. In majority of the baptisms took place 10 to 14 days after the date of birth as recorded on the birth certificates. I expected the baptism to have been on a Sunday after church but checking calendars of the time, the baptisms were on any day of the week. Another thing to take into consideration - it appeared that for the elder children in each family it was always the father who registered the births in my case. When Tim and John first arrived in NZ (1872 and 1874) neither could read and write. So it left to their memories when they got to the Post Office to register the birth as to the date of that birth. It was really interesting to watch the fathers signature gain in strength and confidence each year with the registration of each new child. In the mid 1880's the mothers also started registering the births and again their signatures were very child like to start with but became stronger and more confident with each new registration. The Baptism records were so valuable with the names of the sponsors included. I looked into every sponsor to try and work out if the sponsor was family or friend. This way I found several family connections that I would not otherwise have known about. Yes it was an expensive exercise and one that took a lot of time but well worth the expense and effort. The information I gained was fantastic. Jenny __________ Information from ESET NOD32 Antivirus, version of virus signature database 5456 (20100916) __________ The message was checked by ESET NOD32 Antivirus. http://www.eset.com