This old Danish Church record, written in longhand, is fairly legible and as a human I can make out the various dates and names. But to get a complete understanding one must read the top most header row to understand what is contained in the columnar rows. To avoid the laborious task of Danish > English translation, it seems logical to let Artificial Intelligence (AI) take a crack at it.

I feed this record in its original high resolution image page format to 3 of the top AI bots and posed the same question:

the person of interest is Fanuel Peter August. what is the birth date and christening date?

Claude 3.5 Sonnet:

[reply] Looking at the church record, I can see Fanuel Peter August (written as "Samuel Peter August" in the entry) listed as entry #3. According to the record, his birth date is listed as 19 Jan 1817 ("19 Jan 1817") and his christening date appears to be on the same day as shown in the "Daabens Datum" (baptism date) column.

The entry number 3 is good as is the birth date. The mistaken S instead of F in the first name can be forgiven; it was penned with a flourish. The baptism date from its column in the record however is interpreted as being synonymous with date of birth. My eye can see that there appears to be a differing date in that column so I pose the following follow up question:

what actually does the Daabens Datum column say. it looks like an actual date?

Claude responds with:

Looking at the "Daabens Datum" column for Fanuel Peter August's entry (#3), it shows "19 Feb in die Kirch" (19 February in the church). So to correct my previous response:

Birth date: 19 January 1817
Christening/Baptism date: 19 February 1817

This would have been an apt first time answer but still the Christening/Baptism date shows the 19th when to my eye the number is clearly a 14. Confidence is low so I run this identical query with another flavor of AI: X’s Grok 2

Grok 2

[answer] For Fanuel Peter August:

Birth Date: 19th January 1817
Christening Date: 19th January 1817

This individual appears on line 3 of the document, with his full name listed as "Fanuel Peter August." Both the birth and christening (baptism) dates are noted as the same day, which was common in historical records where infants were often baptized shortly after birth.

This returned response, as far as the dates are concerned, is identical to that of Claude AI previously. There is the added claim that birth/christening dates are commonly one and the same (equal) in historical records. (expectation bias or confabulation? ) That will need to be a separate fact check investigation.

Now I come back with my follow-up question to try and coax the bot to have another look at the Daabens Datum column and:

[answer] Upon closer inspection of the Daabens Datum column for Fanuel Peter August, it reads:

Daabens Datum: 19 Jan 1817

This means that the christening or baptism date for Fanuel Peter August was indeed on January 19, 1817, which matches the birth date also listed as January 19, 1817. This is a common occurrence in historical records where infants were often baptized on the day they were born or shortly thereafter.

Grok doubles down sticking to its guns and refuses to modify its incorrect answer original interpretation. Let’s try ChatGPT.

ChatGPT

This was the best of the bunch. Chat pretty much nails it and with the single query . No follow up question necessary.

[answer] In this record, the entry for "Fanuel Peter August" provides the following details:

Birth Date: 9th January 1817
Christening Date: 11th February 1817

The christening date gets listed as the 11th however. So… less than perfect. Yet, very cool that a machine can scan a difficult document make sense of it and feed a summary back to me with only a one or two sentence plain English prompt. The consensus of bot+person:

Fanuel Peter August
Birth Date: 9th January 1817
Christening Date: 14th February 1817