Well, I come back from a long weekend and find that Bruce has been at it
again. This time, he claims the fault is mine for not stating up front
that the Providence vital records do not have any notations for Stephen
Carpenter. Obviously, he was not paying attention when I posted my
original message because that's precisely what I did state. To be fair,
I must admit that Bruce also blames me for not stating that I possess
the printed records, but, as it happens, I do not actually own them --
the library is where I find them and where anyone else sufficiently
motivated can also find them. In fact, since the LDS FHL has them on
microfilm (I believe they have both the original manuscript records and
the published transcript), anyone anywhere in the world can look at
these after allowing a few weeks lead time, just by visiting the nearest
FHC.
In many ways, the transcript is more useful, not least because of the
tediousness of deciphering the old handwriting in the originals. Also
the transcript is arranged more-or-less alphabetically by surname (and
chronologically by family group within each surname). Of course, the
task of proofreading such a beast is much bigger than proofreading a
verbatim transcript, which is one reason why the modern trend is toward
publishing verbatim (the indexing nowadays can be automated readily).
So, the question arises: what is the likelihood that a particular entry
in the original records was somehow dropped from the transcript by
accident? I'd guess it to be less than 1 in 100, but how *much* less
is hard to say. The real problem lies with the events that occurred
in Providence (or wherever) and were never entered into the records in
the first place. Alden G. Beaman's preface to his "New Series" of
vital records for Rhode Island cites a comparison of numbers of births
actually recorded and those deducible from gravestones -- as I recall,
the birth records account for only about half in a time period from
1775 to 1850. It is presumed that the records were better before that,
when the population was smaller, but it is more difficult to come up
with statistics for those earlier times.
John Chandler