Blessing Certificate Geograpic Information

When creating a Blessing Certificate it allows one to type in the location of the Blessing. How should this be formatted? City, State, Country? And should one abbreviate the State?

I don't see anything in the User Manual, and don't recall anything from any other source (although I would love to know if there is some kind of guideline).

On the certificate, I list the city, county, and state. To allow the certificate to pull from the record by default, I always time the entire state (Utah, instead of UT). I make a point of not abbreviating (particularly on the membership records) in case the record goes out of country. While in the US most people may know what WI is, those in the Ivory Coast likely do not.

nutterb wrote:While in the US most people may know what WI is, those in the Ivory Coast likely do not.

I see certificates as more for show. In that light, abbreviations seems a bit tacky (unless you're running out of space), IMO.

I have encouraged all clerks I have trained to follow the Family History place naming conventions as used in new.FamilySearch.org of Town/City, County/Parish, State/Province, Country. For example:

Salt Lake City, Salt Lake, Utah, United States;
Provo, Utah, Utah, United States;
Tulsa, Tulsa, Oklahoma, United States;
Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, Oklahoma, United States;
Elwood, Box Elder, Utah, United States;
Vernal, Uintah, Utah, United States;
Evanston, Uinta, Wyoming, United States;
Ardrossan, Strathcona, Alberta, Canada;
et cetera.

There is an old saying: Don't abbrev.

nutterb wrote:On the certificate, I list the city, county, and state. To allow the certificate to pull from the record by default, I always time the entire state (Utah, instead of UT). I make a point of not abbreviating (particularly on the membership records) in case the record goes out of country. While in the US most people may know what WI is, those in the Ivory Coast likely do not.

A child blessing record is a local record only. It is not stored at CHQ and therefore it does not move when the record moves.

Since the printed certificate is the only record of the blessing once the individual record moves out. For the same reasons as mentioned by others I would make sure the location information is as clear as possible.

jdlessley wrote:A child blessing record is a local record only. It is not stored at CHQ and therefore it does not move when the record moves.

Since the printed certificate is the only record of the blessing once the individual record moves out. For the same reasons as mentioned by others I would make sure the location information is as clear as possible.

I'm aware of the local nature, but MLS will still pull the information in the birthplace field on the membership record as the default for the certificate when you print it. I guess my comment was directed less toward what to put on the certificate and more toward what to put on the membership record.

I went with city, Santa Fe, state, New Mexico, but left out the county since it is also Santa Fe and would be confusing. It is of course recorded correctly in MLS. This was first post and I really enjoyed the feedback.