Playing Detective

I got to do one of my favourite hobbies at work today -- playing detective. I honed the skill back when I was in grad school and had to dig up random facts on various dead people. I once took 18 months to turn up a death notice for a man who had seemingly "vanished into thin air" according to the history books and a prominent encyclopedia. I'm still proud of that one.

Anyway, a mom assured me that her son, set to receive a sacrament in our parish, was baptized in the parish too. The parish registers indicated otherwise. I told her this, and she insisted we were mistaken, so I had the secretary give me some insight as to how I might carry the search further on old baptism applications in our records room. The pastor threw in his two cents also and suggested I check the old Mass books. Today I got down and dirty -- literally, *cough*! -- and crawled around a narrow, dusty old room in the basement going through years past of old applications. When my search turned up nothing, I remembered some electronic files on baptisms in my office and found the date of the sister's baptism. Or so I thought. That led me on a wild goose chase as I discovered the disk contained erroneous information and there was no record of her baptism for certain, either.

Not one to be defeated when I'm working on a mystery, I started on the Mass books. Started back in the 1890s, actually, until I found the decade I wanted some hundred and ten years later. Fascinating stuff down there... Anyway, I started flipping through the dusty old books, one by one, and about three hours after I started this intensive search, I found it! I found a notation in pencil in the Mass book with the brother and sister's first names around the time the mom thought the baptism had occurred. The priest who performed the baptism is deceased, so I can't confirm with him that it actually happened, but it would seem that he just forgot to record it and likely never filled out the requisite paperwork. I checked with the pastor and thankfully, this seems to be proof enough, so we do not need to resort to extraordinary measures to ensure that these young people are actually baptized.