Double christening?

[Ili1133]

Thomas Jonas Smithson was christened in Wales, West Riding of Yorkshire on 11 May 1834, the son of Joseph, a labourer, and Hannah. Residence Wales.

Thomas Jonas Smithson was christened in Beighton, Derbyshire on 10 August 1834, the son of Joseph, a miller, and Anna. Residence Wales.

Both christenings are entered in the respective PRs.

Wales and Beighton are two miles apart.

The family generally christened their children in Wales, and Thomas Jonas is a middle child. There are no other Smithson baptisms in Beighton (nor can I find a Smithson miller in the district).

Any suggestions as to what is going on here and why?

[BumbleB]

Not sure - there are definitely two images of the parish register at Wales for this baptism, so possibly one is the parish record and other is the Bishops Transcript entry - both are identical in name, date of baptism etc.  The third = Beighton - is merely a transcription from Family Search.  The Beighton  entry has been transcribed as James, hence I couldn't see it at first 

And then we have two occupations for the father - Labourer or Miller!  And two versions of mother's forename - Hannah or Anne and we have two different officials.   So do we have two families choosing the same name? 

[arthurk]

BumbleB's comments are worth pursuing, but if they do both relate to the same child, one possibility is that the first one was a private baptism (usually because the child was ill) and the second the reception into church, which completed the ceremony. But unless there's a note referring to this in either or both registers, that can only be speculation.

Another possibility (unless the entry says explicitly that the baptism was performed by the minister) is that the one in May was an emergency/private baptism carried out by the midwife - this was permitted where it was thought that a newborn child wasn't going to survive. Then the second one - if there was some doubt as to the validity of the first - could be a 'conditional baptism'.

But why Beighton? Was there some family connection there? Baptism is only supposed to take place once, but people do find cases where a child has been baptised where its parents lived, and then again somewhere else, often where one set of grandparents lived.

Incidentally, I see from the transcript of Wales registers at Genuki that Thomas Jonas Smithson was buried there on 18 Sep 1834.

[BumbleB]

No indication on the Beighton register that this was a private baptism - all baptisms on the page are attributed to the same cleric!

Oh the joys of family research 

[Ili1133]

Tanks - and yes, it’s odd. The pages of the Wales register don’t suggest anything unusual going on - dates of the 1834 baptisms quite regularly spaced so it looks on paper as if the church was functioning as normal.

There’s a possibility Thomas Jonas’s mother had siblings resident in Beighton but it doesn’t look as if either set of grandparents were living there.

If both baptisms refer to the same child, and the child was sickly (he died in September), could the second baptism in Beighton in August have anything to do with the cleric? A personal favour of some sort (which could explain him recording a deliberate difference in occupation)? A sort of insurance in case the child died away from home? I don’t find this very likely (after all home was only two miles away!) and conducting a ‘duplicate’ baptism wouldn’t be particularly lucrative for the cleric.

This is just brainstorming - I haven’t come across a similar case.

[osprey]

the first baptism could have been a private baptism, possibly at home, and the second one receiving the child into the congregation.

https://www.rootschat.com/forum/index.php?topic=732731.msg5778352#msg5778352

[coombs]

My 5xgreat gran's sister was baptised twice in 1758 and another sibling of a 4xgreat grandmother baptised twice, at her mother's birth parish and her father's birth parish.

In 1910 my great gran was baptised aged 14 when living in a Hackney convent, but had been baptised as a baby in Oxford in 1895. Perhaps she was unaware she had been baptised as a baby. The convent in the 1911 census had several teenage girls training for domestic service.

[BumbleB]

There is nothing in either baptism record to suggest that the earlier one was a private baptism (and there are two versions of this entry). 

A very long shot BUT was there more than one couple involved here.  A couple in Wales and a couple in Beighton? 

Do we have any other children born to these parents?

[Andrew Tarr]

An ancestor of my wife's was baptised (also in the 1830s) in a rural part of Northumberland by a peripatetic presbyterian minister based in Newcastle, and again 10 months later in her own parish church which was newly built and had just opened.