Family Historian User Group

Oh dear more mistakes by me. I have added a number of children with a born on and it should have been baptised on. Can I, how do I change the relationship for existing records (little nervous of unlinking and trying to add existing record)?

ID:5996

Do not unlink/link these child records.
Regardless of the Birth/Baptism Fact, they are still children of the family.

Unfortunately, it is rather awkward to change a Birth Fact into a Baptism Fact in FH V4.
It can be done by editing the GEDCOM file, but you need to know how to use a text editor.

If you are intending to upgrade to FH V5, when it is available, then it has a feature that allows such changes to be easily made.

May I recommend you use Ancestral Sources for entering Baptism records.

BTW: If you have a Baptism Source then it is quite natural to derive both a Birth Fact and a Baptism Fact from that record.
Both Facts would cite the same Baptism Source record.
The Date of Birth would be estimated as say 1 month before the Baptism and the Place of Birth assumed to be the same as the Baptism.
Ancestral Sources does all this donkey work automatically for you.

So with this strategy, you don't so much need to change a Birth into a Baptism, but to add a Baptism.

Thank you. Yes I have used ancestral sources and very impressed particulalry with the video tutorials on youtube. Just installing V3.
I had originally created these entries with gedcom census and was just tweaking (fiddling) and putting data correct in FH.
Thanks for the tip on bap & b but think I will keep only to what is fact because I want to keep a theme. This child was baptised 1 month after marriage of parents and the father was baseborn. Later on a third William Brooks Dowsett dies at age 2 (1901) in Newcastle after the father left his home town in Essex leaving wife and children (he marries a second time).
If I created a bap entry linked to parents would it then be okay to delete the born fact in FH?

jbrooks said:
If I created a bap entry linked to parents would it then be okay to delete the born fact in FH?

Why not make the birth fact 'before [baptism date]'. (e.g. if the baptism date was '2 Jun 1895' then the birth date would be 'bef 2 June 1895'.) That will always be correct. The Source for the baptism event is still a Source for the birth date.

The way AS handles Baptism Records is as follows:
1) It creates a Baptism Source Record with a transcript in the Text From Source field, and any other details or images entered via AS.
2) This Baptism Source Record is cited as the source of the Name field in both parent's Individual Records.
3) This same Baptism Source Record is cited as the source of the Baptism Event (and optionally Birth Event) for the child's Individual Record.

If you only have a few Birth Events that should really be Baptism Events then they can be deleted, or use Gerry's idea above.
(Presumably you are expecting to find GRO Birth Certificates eventually.)

Then add a Baptism Event for each child, and link it via a Citation to its Baptism Source Record.
(You do this on the Property Box > Events tab.)

thanks again for help, yes I can see some options including data re-entry. This is something I have accepted that I might have to do because I did not approach using FH with such accuracy originally. Fortunately my research was far more rigid and have copious indexed notes plus print outs from 12-16 years ago.

No GRO records as this is 1832 with names in full, part complete and the father not even mentioned in the register. I have a slightly later bap entry with the correct parent names but the name of the son as the mothers maiden name. Slight lack of consistency in the records, oh what fun.

Ancestral sources V3 going good and the video tutorials are once again excellant.

For these pre=1837 Baptisms it is even more sensible to have a Birth Event (as well as a Baptism Event) linked to the Baptism Source Record in the way AS does.
This is because you are unlikely to ever obtain any formal documentation for the Birth.
Also it is quite common for the Birth Date to appear in the Baptism Record, which would support the Birth Event, and AS caters for that too.

BTW: I presume you know that the YouTube tutorial videos form only part of the tutorials in the Knowledge Base at Ancestral Sources Tutorials.