Can we get some Baptist love here?

Question

So I'm starting to add categories to my profiles, and I added the "Baptists" category, and then clicked on the resulting link to make sure that it led to the right page. To my shock, the page at http://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Category:Baptists only listed four people, and they were all people that I had tagged myself. I went out looking for some of the more famous Baptists, and either added the tag myself or asked the profile managers if they might consider doing so, but with 406 years of Baptist history and at least 160 million Baptists around today, I'm thinking that there must be hordes of profiles which should be tagged as Baptist already on the system.

Hence this little reminder that, if you're working on a profile and you know for a fact that the subject is/was a Baptist, perhaps you might want to consider maybe possibly thinking about tagging them as such. Eventually.

Greg

Comments

OK, I give.  What's the punch line?

---

The moral of that story seems to be "don't hit 'Enter' when the cursor is in the tags box."

---

Someone please show me where in the source documents anyone has ever seen a reference to any Protestant sect.  I have never seen such a reference.

---

Hi Greg

My grandfather was a baptist pastor and was reasonably well known (I believe).  I shall try to add this tag for him.  His name is James Henry Jauncey.

---

Tony,

I suppose it depends on the source. In the Canada Census results, it's very common to have a column for "Denomination", and in British Columbia marriage certificates (at least in the early part of the 20th century), there was a line for "denomination" or "religion" for the groom and for the bride.

And, of course, in the case of pastors, there are records of them being called to churches, performing marriages, speaking at conventions, and so on.

Greg

---

I've been meaning to add a subcategory for "Primitive Baptists." ... to help me arrange records for a very particular area of Tennessee, in hopes to get more data about obscure grannies and aunties. Men seem to generally have better luck being documented ... but I'm increasingly relying on church records to find out more about the matriarchs...

Thanks for reminding me:)

---

Oh, I'm sure we could break down into any number of Baptist groups: General Baptists, Particular Baptists, Southern Baptists, Seventh Day Baptists, you name it. (We do have some Primitive Baptists in Canada, too.) Although I have to admit that, with the small number of profiles currently tagged as any kind of Baptist, the notion of subdividing into smaller groups strikes me as somewhat... premature.

Greg

---

True...  but over time it may matter more as people try to find original records ... The Quaker project is already on a roll. They break their societies down by area, which I find great for locating Colonial marriages, baptisms, etc, as well as info about pioneers after the Revolution. So maybe that's the easier way to start out. The nice part about it is that the Cemeteries project (along with the church category), has done so much work, that it might be simpler to take a look at what they've got, and try to break it down from there.

---

I used the Religion template to identify my paternal grandmother, Inez Herrington, as a Southern Baptist. Perhaps, as a non-Baptist, I'm ignorant, but I was under the impression that there are significant differences between various Baptist sects, so a single designation seems inappropriate. Bree's mention of the Quaker project and its usefulness seems really appropriate here. I'm sure that by being more aware of the various denominations and individual church memberships (even when they change) we can find ways to connect family members.

---

Well, yes, Bree and Pamela, you both have points. It's just that, as a Baptist, I am very aware of just how fragmented Baptists are. (The last time I checked, there were 21 different Baptists conventions just in Canada, and something over 200 in the USA. And that's not counting all the independent Baptist churches that aren't part of any convention.) I really didn't want to have to go to all the work of breaking people up into categories that fine. But, on the other hand, the finer the categories we use, the more likely it is that finding two people in the same category means that they have a family connection, too.

Greg

---

That's exactly it. Setting up categories really does require some strategy, and I believe they need to fall in line with the basic rules laid out by the categorization team.

Don't quote me, but I think that top level categories (i.e. Baptists) must always be pluralized. Since there's more than 10 million profiles on WikiTree, they are normally reserved for instruction, synopsis, help links etc... Then the subcategories are created for people's profiles. This helps to control overload, so we still find people.

There also seems to be a movement to file subcategories by locale. I think the naming structure is: subcategory name, city, state ... but I could be wrong, and need to read up on that one. (Probably the best thing to do is follow the categorization team on G2G, and ask them a question.)

 

Then there's the more specific issue of how to deal with, or integrate overlap. For instance, I did a category search for "baptist," and on the first page of results... I can see that there's at least 10 pages of Baptist churches and cemeteries. You can try it to see what results you'll get with the custom Google search link: https://cse.google.com/cse/publicurl?cx=003048598688029858478:aemrovxydzo

Answer 1

People or pages in Baptists

There are 8 profiles on this category page.http://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Category:Baptists What does it add? 

 

Comments

In that families regularly migrate from one denomination to another over time it adds very little and certainly nothing helpful.

---

Just a thought, but if the individual religious bodies could be separated by location, it might be very helpful because relatives often attended services at the same location. Also, descendants of other members of the religious group (Timber Ridge Baptist Church, for example) might have collected data that would help the descendants of unrelated members.

---

Like any category, it's data. In my research, I'm grateful for every shred of data I can uncover, because the more you know, the more you can narrow down potential candidates. For instance, it appears that you couldn't swing a cat in England in the mid-19th century without hitting somebody with the same name as my great great great grandfather. Even knowing his wife's name doesn't eliminate all the other candidates, as it appears that there were at least two other couples with the same first name living in England at about the same time. (Thus, I can't tell whether Selina Louisa Slade, born in 1865, was my great great great aunt, and died before the family emigrated the next year, or the daughter of some other, unrelated, couple with the same names.) You never know what's going to help you identify a match: birthdate, birthplace, siblings, school, profession, religion, or what, so discarding data just because it doesn't seem important when you turn it up strikes me as shortsighted.

Greg

---

Now how to thank Lynden from here, besides saying ty here. :) Me blond.............

Answer 2

Some time back, I set up a page called Baptist Notables to track Baptist notables as I find them. I thought I had posted about that in G2G, but there was no link to a post from the page, so apparently not. So, for those of you who are interested, that's a start.

Also, another member of my home church and I have been working on a page for that church, including links to profiles for former pastors and missionaries sent out from that church. I assume that other people have put up pages for their churches, too, but I haven't tripped over any yet.

Which bring up another topic that several of you have already alluded to: Categories. I know the religion categories have been reworked since I was involved with the Categorization Project, but I haven't used categories on the profiles I'm working on in years, so I'm pretty out of touch, there. But it does seem that categorising all these people with [[Category:Baptist_Ministers]] is going to lead to a bloated and somewhat useless category. I'm going to have to look into how the religion categories work now, but it seems to me that there should be a category something like [[Category:First_Baptist_Church,_Vancouver,_British_Columbia,_Ministers]], and then a couple of interim categories like [[Category:Canadian_Baptists_in_British_Columbia,_Ministers]] and [[Category:Canadian_Baptist_Ministries,_Ministers]] leading up to [[Category:Baptist_Ministers]]. (And that's before even considering historical changes in the names of the conventions.)

Comments

Oh, yes. I'm also wondering if there should be similar profile hierarchies starting with something like [[Category:First_Baptist_Church,_Vancouver,_British_Columbia,_Officers]] (for people like deacons and moderators at the congregation level, and presidents, general secretaries, etc. at the convention level).

Answer 3

I'm not sure I appreciate the value of a 'Baptists' Category (nor would I an Anglican/Episcopalian, Methodist, Presbyterian or other general and vague grouping). Don't we already use Categories for particular congregations/churches/parishes which group together the profiles of people who more than likely associated with one another, e.g. Beaudesert Baptist Church? Then there are Categories for Baptist ministers.  Surely we need to avoid categories just for the sake of categories.

Comments

This is the right way to deal with religion.

---

Why? Who says? Surely, the 'right way' would be to call it Christian as that is the Religion we're discussing. Baptist, etc is merely the Christian denomination. BTW, at last count there are more than 350 Christian denominations (and that is not taking into account the couple of hundred countries in which Christianity exists, many of whose denominations are set apart from those of the same name in other countries), and then of course, there are non-denominational groups and those who, whilst attending a particular denomination's church, do not regard themselves as that denomination (like myself; I'm Christian).

---

I should point out that, when I wrote the original post, the Baptists category only had four profiles in it, all of which I had tagged myself. Now, there are 345 proifles in that category, a Baptist Faiths category above it, and four other categories and two free-space profiles under Baptist Faiths. So things have certainly picked up in the past eight years.

I do agree with you that categories for individual churches or congregations are the most meaningful, but one of the rules of the Categorization Project is (or at least used to be) that categories can't just "dead end": every category must link upwards to at least one other category, and every chain of categories must end with [[Category:Categories]]. So Beaudesert Baptist Church leads up to [[Category:Queensland, Religious Congregations]] and up through several levels, eventually ending in [[Category:Categories]]. But it's also possible to have it go up through categories like [[Category:Queensland Baptists]], [[Category:Australian Baptist Ministries]], and [[Category:Baptist Denominations]]. It just makes it easier to find a specific category if you can "drill down" to it in multiple ways. (And, remember, the whole point of having categories at all is to enable finding connections between the profiles in those categories. I had that driven home to me while I was reworking the Occupations categories. It's amazing how many time you find that somebody married the child of a workmate, for example.)

And, yes, I hear you saying that denominations don't matter to you. Many people feel the same way you do. But there are also people to whom denominations are very important. WikiTree isn't about imposing our views on dead relatives. It's about recording their lives. So for those relatives of mine who self-identified as Baptists (or Methodists, or Presbyterians, or whatever), I record that fact, just like I record any other.

---

Greg, as part of the advent of the Religious congregations Category Info box, the category structure for religious denominations was removed / or still being removed. The congregations CIB has a parameter for affiliation, which can be used for WT+ searches. A congregation category like Beaudesert Baptist Church, is in both the "Religious Congregations" structure and the "Locations" structure, ie, it has two parent categories.

See this G2G post and this help page.

---

Margaret is correct. I need to get back to cleaning this up but denominations are problematic. The Baptist example is one where there are problems. Which Baptist do you mean? American, Southern Baptist Convention or back to Colonial era, Separate, Primitive, Regular, Free WIll, etc.. They all get called Baptist but had differences that mattered to those involved. In the USA alone there are more than 10,000 religious denominations. They split and merge regularly. Churches (Congregations) tend to be more stable even if the "denomination" changes.