Please let us have multiple names under Vitals
As FamilySearch has more and more people all over the world using Family Tree, the old problem of what a person's Vital name should be keeps coming up. Is it his name in English? Is it his name in his native language? Is it his name in the language of the Family Tree user entering it? Is it his birth name? Is it his legal name? Is it his name prior to emigration? Is it his name after emigration? Is it what everyone knew him by?
Users have strong opinions about what should be a person's main name and what should be relegated to Other Information and these opinions have led to some conflict in the tree and people wasting time repeatedly changing names.
Due to these facts, it would be very useful, as requested here by many others in the past, to have more than one name in the Vitals section so that all the names of major significance listed there have equal weight in the eyes of users and equal visibility, reserving Other Information Alternate Names for spelling variants, nicknames, and other minor names.
A preference button should be included so that each user can mark the name he or she wants to see on pedigree charts and in the Family Members section to keep those sections of Family Tree uncluttered. The multiple names should only show in the Vitals section. Something like this:
Thank you for considering this improvement to Family Tree.
Comments
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This would have to be accompanied by (or follow after) a complete change to the source tagging setup, because the current structure depends on everything in Vitals being single-valued.
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As long as all fields in the name block are viewed as a single value, as it is now for Japanese, the current source tagging should still function fine. But maybe this would be a final push to finally get tagging on Other Information.
I would view the editing box to be similar to the current structure for Japanese. I would also think that four main names should be sufficient, six at the very most.
To simplify things, I would have only one name field when first opened but with the option to add additional name fields as needed.
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