Analysis

A complete child inventory needs fourteen named instruments, not one provider's index

Parish baptisms reach a searcher through several independent transcriptions of overlapping originals, plus the originals themselves, so a complete inventory names every instrument and every catalogued record carries which one it came from. Fourteen are in scope: the county transcription sets, which carry father, mother and place columns and archive references; the national aggregate index, which carries rows that exist in no other provider; the cross-collection and parent-search query modes, which are an access layer over the first two but reach rows the single-dataset mode cannot; two IGI-derived commercial sets and two archive-partnership sets, one of which indexes mothers where the older sets do not; volunteer parish transcription, which is the only instrument that states its own per-parish coverage; full-text document search, which reads document text rather than an index; bishop's transcripts; printed register transcripts; the register images themselves; the project's own prior work; and the source registry's per-set notes. Two of those deserve emphasis. Bishop's transcripts are a second contemporary witness to the same register and survive where registers do not, so no county is finished until both series are accounted for - demonstrated rather than asserted, since one county's commercial baptism index is bishop's transcripts while the volunteer set transcribes parish registers, and the two return materially different Gurney event sets for the same county and window. And the source registry is a genuinely separate witness: it records what an instrument returned on a given date, which is exactly what a fresh sweep is at risk of getting wrong, and it has been right when the research layer was wrong.

Confidence: High

Topic file location: Identity — method for a complete child inventory