Can a person be half-baptised?

[Canuk]

I have a page from a 1818 baptismal register that has a couple of children of the family that I am researching registered as 'half baptised'. A couple of years later they are registered in the same church in the normal was as being baptised.  Now, I'm an Anglican, (as were they) and I always thought that either you were baptised or you weren't.  Maybe somebody with more religious education can tell me what is going on here.  Has anybody else seen or heard of this?

These children were from an affluent family that all lived reasonably close by in the suburbs London, so it wasn't like they had to wait to get together.   

[karenlee]

Hi

From what I can recall... and my memory may by faulty of course....

It is a common term for an abbreviated form of the Baptism by Priests, usually done at home soon after birth of the child especially if the child is sickly or not expected to survive long enough for formal Church Baptism.


Karenlee

[Billyblue]

Intriguing!
Maybe it is a reference to the Anglican practice of re-baptising children who have been baptised in an emergency situation but not in church?

Whereas if they had been Catholic, it wouldn't arise, as one doesn't have to be baptised by a priest or in church, to be baptised as R/C.

     
Dawn M

Note, Karenlee has just suggested the same.

[Alexander.]

Checking the RootsChat Lexicon, there is an entry for Half Baptism

It includes these links which may be of help:
http://www.rootschat.com/forum/index.php/topic,246546.0.html
http://www.rootschat.com/forum/index.php/topic,104599.0.html

Alexander

[Winterbloom21]

This is interesting.    I found a half sister of my grandmother who was born in March 1883 and baptised, at a church, in April 1883.       Then, I found the same child baptised, with one of her siblings, in 1889, at a different church.      I wondered whether it had something to do with the fact that her mother had died and her father remarried within 3 months in 1887 and that maybe her stepmother didn't realise that she had already been 'done'!

[stanmapstone]

The baptism service consists of two parts, the baptism itself and the public receiving of the infant before the congregation at a service in the church as a member of Christ’s flock. If a child is baptised privately, they ought to be brought to the Church as soon as possible to be received as members of " the flock of true Christian people". This is why the term "half baptised" is sometimes used, because the second part has not been carried out. However children that are baptized privately, are not half baptized, as it is commonly called, but truly and validly baptized. (A general notice to the people of Southea with Murrow in Cambridgeshire published in the Wisbech Deanery Magazine Dec 1890.)

[Lydart]

We always hold baptisms in our church in the context of a proper Sunday service, so both aspects are done at one go !

[stanmapstone]

We always hold baptisms in our church in the context of a proper Sunday service, so both aspects are done at one go !

So do we. It is very rare for the C of E to hold private baptisms today, according to our vicar, and not encouraged. Also, in my opinion, the churches that conduct baptisms in a separate service, where the regular congregation is not present, are in the wrong.

Stan

[Lydart]

Quite !    My opinion too !