Baptism in a church other than home parish?

[Phemie]

Parishes keep sacramental records of their parishioners, even if those parishioners were baptized somewhere else. Most sacramental records, though, are done as addenda to a baptismal record.

If we’re not the baptismal parish, Marriages, Confirmations and First Communions are entered into their own appropriate registers and the date of baptism is recorded in the Confirmation/First Communion/Marriage registers rather than vice-versa. We don’t just enter the Baptism into our own registers years later.

I keep finding more and more baptisms that are registered elsewhere entered into that parish’s register. There was a fire in the early 80s, that destroyed the original records. They were not archived at the diocese at the time.

Apparently a census of the community had been done for governmental purposes not too long before the fire and they had used baptismal records for that purpose. In an attempt to reconstruct the records, someone took it upon themselves to enter into a new register all the names they got from the government. Unfortunately, they did not distinguish between those baptisms that had been celebrated in the parish from those that had been celebrated outside. To make matters worse, the priests started issuing certificates based on these reconstructed records rather than referring them back to the parish of their baptism. The priest who entered the baptism I originally asked about, did so on the say-so of the parents much later, some time in the 90s IIRC.

To make matters even worse yet, during the record reconstruction they entered not the names as they had originally been recorded but anglicized pronunciation and spellings, something that Vital Statistics says is absolutely useless when the person presents him/herself for a birth certificate and this is the only information they have.

All this to say, the records prior to 1988 are a total disaster.