There were no original names. Didn’t have godparents.
So, was your original Baptism recorded at all?
I know that parents are to be listed as unknown if the child is a foundling or if neither the mother and father want to acknowledge that they are the parents. I’ve seen old records where only the first name of the child and date of baptism were recorded. What I haven’t found is anything to indicate how priests dealt with the subsequent need for a Certificate of Baptism to be confirmed or married in another parish.
I have also seen some really messed up baptismal records. In two of the parishes I’ve dealt with it was not unusual for the grandparents to be given their grandchild to raise. In fact, in one community it was pretty much standard for the first grandchild born to each child was “given” to the grandmother. The records in those parishes are a mess because the priest recorded the grandparents as the birth parents although there was no legal adoption.
To further mess things up, in the province at the time, the Churches were responsible for submitting information to Vital Statistics. After celebrating a Baptism, the priest submitted a ‘return of birth’ providing all the information of given names, surnames, date and place of birth, parents names, ages, addresses and occupation, place and date of baptism. Vital Stats compared that with the records of live birth they had from the hospital in the town and, as you can imagine, often in those two communities, the records often didn’t match.
If we were lucky the person at VS called us and the case was straightened out. But most often a letter was sent to the grandparents who most likely didn’t read or even speak English and the letter was ignored. To this day there are people who are recorded at Vital Statistics simply as ‘boy born to Jane Doe, this date, this town’. No given name is recorded and the father is listed as unknown even though he may be acknowledged as the child’s father in the community.
