Baptizing the dead

Jean Paterson drew my attention to a column Baptizing the dead by Paul Jones in Canada's History Magazine.

"Around the world each year, too many irreplaceable documents are destroyed by fire, flood, mould, or human stupidity. Those who forbid the LDS Church from filming their records rarely put in place a digitization program of comparable ambition, so losses are permanent, a tragedy for all. Unfortunately, the interests of genealogists — and the future of a pile of crumbling documents — seem to count for little in the high-stakes world of priestly realpolitik, or in the holier-than-thou hideaways of Mormon renegades."

I think of this every time somebody mentions the collection at Ottawa's Anglican Archives, including a carefully preserved collection of parish registers, but entirely one-off. If, or perhaps more accurately when, they have a disaster which destroys the records we'll have to satisfy ourselves with wringing our hands. The Archives did fairly recently suffer from a flood.

Paul Jones will be a speaker at the OGS Conference coming up in St Catharines with what some will regard as a provocative Sunday afternoon talk "Determining how much  confidence you should have in your genealogical inferences"

We'll be looking forward to welcoming Paul in Ottawa at the BIFHSGO conference where he will give three presentations.

Thanks to Jean for the tip.