Add the blurb about using a maiden name to the Edit Name dialog in vital information
When creating a new profile page, this is what the name field shows:
When editing that same field for an exiting profile, that note is missing.
This should be added to the Edit Name field for Vital Info (but not for Alternate Names), and should include a note to leave it blank if unknown.
Also, "Last Name" should be singular. Even if it's hyphenated or multiple words (e.g. St. Claire, Van der Jagt), it's still one name.
Comments
-
Re: your last point, no, it's not always a single name. In Hungarian, for example, some families had extra, "disambiguating" surnames added to their family name, to tell them apart from other community members who otherwise had exactly the same names. These extra names were all surnames in position and usage, so they all belong in the (badly-labeled for a surname-first language like Hungarian) "Last Names" field. (Most of the extra names I've encountered originated as the maiden surname of someone's wife or mother.) Then there are the Spanish and Portuguese customs of using both parents' surnames for the children (in opposite orderings of father's versus mother's, so that I never remember which is supposed to be which).
In short, the plural on that field label is the one thing about it that's absolutely correct.
2 -
Then that label should change when those countries/languages are selected from the pop-up menu. Since the fields already change for certain selections, it shouldn't be hard to implement that. It's definitely not "absolutely" correct for English and most others, and gives the impression that all the surnames the person had (incl. married or changed surnames) should be added.
It's debatable whether the situations you described should still be considered to be multiple surnames. Even if they're constructed from multiple other names, they become one surname with multiple words. (And If those multiple parts are not consistently used, they would probably fall into the category of a "name variants caused by naming customs, such as dit names", which the guideline states belong in Other Information.)
0 -
Having acquired a surname that happens to be spelled with a Dratted Hyphen, I am highly sensitive to what exactly constitutes a single name. (Standard grump: the hyphen is not an excuse to drop half of it, or to re-arrange the parts.) Both the Hungarian and the Spanish/Portuguese examples are very definitely multiple surnames: they have no relation to each other, other than both being attached to the same person. One name does not modify the other, not even when one of them is something like Kis "Little" or Nagy "Big/Elder". However, they're not name variants: it would be completely impossible to determine which name belonged in Vitals and which in Other. It's the abbreviated versions that are the variants -- the records that drop one of the names, or use just the first initial of one of them.
Revising the field label by language would not help, because America is too multicultural. Multiple-named immigrants generally tried to fit all of their names into the English mold for at least a little while, and there are multiple-named Englishmen, too.
Any librarian will tell you that navigating the sorting rules for different languages is Not Trivial, but that single, inclusive data fields are much easier to deal with than multiple fields that need to be treated differently in different languages.
You may find this now over a decade-old blog post instructive: https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-believe-about-names/
And here's a follow-up from 2018 which annotates the post with examples: https://shinesolutions.com/2018/01/08/falsehoods-programmers-believe-about-names-with-examples/
1 -
It took me quite a while to figure out that your main issue here is in the wording of the heading - i.e., you think it should read "Last Name", not "Last Names". Yes, I can see your point - assuming you accept "Reason alias Hucks" was the last name of several generations of one branch in my ancestry.
Perhaps you are being a little fussy over this, though. Surely "First Names" could also be said to be an inaccurate heading, too? The common question is, "Do you have a middle name?" (not so much "What are your first names?"- so would you want that changed, too?
Maybe you don't like the current "Last Names" heading because you feel it encourages users to add, for females, a birth name as well as a married name - e.g. for a woman born Mary Smith, who married a man named Brown, they might think they should input "Mary Smith Brown" - the latter two as "Last Names".
I just wonder why - if not along these lines - that final "s" is worrying you so much. Perhaps you would explain / confirm your reasons.
0 -
@Paul W, I was the one who fastened onto the original poster's last comment, which was indeed about the plural on the field label. Most of his suggestion is actually about the absence of the "Enter birth or maiden name" instruction from the Edit window for the Vitals name. I have no strong opinion on that -- people ignore it even if they're creating a new profile, where the instruction is present -- but I Have Objections to the poster's glib assumption that his experience of people's names ought to be everyone else's experience as well.
No matter how the name fields are arranged and labeled, people will misuse them. I've heard -- but not verified -- that one of the gravestone databases used the label "Family Names", which prompted some clueless users to list every name ever used in the family in that field. Whether this is specifically true or not is immaterial: the fact that it's entirely believable is what matters. There's a bumper sticker about this: "Make it idiot-proof and someone will make a better idiot."
FamilySearch's name fields are vastly preferable to, say, WikiTree's, which take unconscious Anglo-centric thinking to extremes. (Most of the world has no concept of middle names. On WikiTree, you have to mark the "no middle name" radio button Every Single Time you enter a new profile.) Also, since FamilySearch uses every name field for its searching and matching algorithms, it actually doesn't really matter whether a name was entered in the correct slots. The more nitpicky among us can re-arrange things to suit our understanding of how things should be, while those whose focus is on other things can rest assured that the data is there and findable.
1 -
It took me quite a while to figure out that your main issue here is in the wording of the heading
Well, my original post was just that it should be clear the surname field is for maiden names only. The rest of the discussion about labeling the field was just a tangent. I doubt either change would have much effect, but as you mentioned, a singular would help discourage editors from entering both maiden and (possibly multiple) married names much more often than it would ever confuse anybody out of entering a hyphenated or multi-word surname.
Yes, I can see your point - assuming you accept "Reason alias Hucks" was the last name of several generations of one branch in my ancestry.
It wouldn't fall within any accepted guideline to put both names in the primary vital name field, or include the word "alias", especially when there's an entire system dedicated to handling that situation. I assure you I won't intentionally go out to change it, but if I ran across it during normal editing, I'd move the alias to Other Information and keep the birth/legal name in vitals.
The name help page gives some leeway about using the "most commonly used name" and putting birth name in Other Information. (I understand the concept, but as written it could be misinterpreted as allowing nicknames.) Since six of my great-grandparents were immigrants, I've often had to decide whether to use their actual birth names or their anglicized versions. I try to stick to birth names, but it doesn't make sense to use an Italian or Armenian name for somebody who arrived in America at age 5 and legally changed their name at naturalization.
Perhaps you are being a little fussy over this, though. Surely "First Names" could also be said to be an inaccurate heading, too? The common question is, "Do you have a middle name?" (not so much "What are your first names?"- so would you want that changed, too?
Actually, yes, absolutely, it should be "Given name(s)". I wouldn't call out "first and middle" because so many people never had middle names (although there's a bothersome tendency to add one regardless). And also because a fair chunk of people went by a middle name rather than a first.
And yeah, it's fussy, but a) it's an incremental improvement, albeit a small one, and b) the changes being suggested are incredibly easy to implement, pose little to no engineering risk, and are simple to revert if they don't work out.
I have plenty of hills to die on, but if something as simple as getting "use maiden name" added to a dialog, or changing the name help page to add "leave the last name field blank if a woman's maiden name is unknown" and getting "mister" removed from the example of titles (since it's referring to an archaic formal usage rather than the modern common honorific) -- if we can't get even those miniscule changes made, why bother suggesting anything?
0 -
I Have Objections to the poster's glib assumption that his experience of people's names ought to be everyone else's experience as well.
I never implied this. I completely recognize that you work with a culture with a different understanding of surnames, and suggested ways to handle those situations. Actually, you discarded my culturally-based concerns by insisting that the field label was "absolutely correct" after I pointed out how it could feed into novice editors' misinterpretation of what belongs there. I think a singular would help discourage editors from entering both maiden and (possibly multiple) married names. I sincerely doubt it would ever confuse anybody out of entering a hyphenated or multi-word surname -- I honestly can't imagine that scenario ever happening. You have a hyphenated last name; have you ever been asked your last name and only given half of it because you weren't sure they wanted the whole thing?
0 -
You will probably notice I have responded to your recent post at https://community.familysearch.org/en/discussion/comment/456849#Comment_456849 on a similar topic.
Regarding to your response to the "alias" example I mentioned here:
It wouldn't fall within any accepted guideline to put both names in the primary vital name field, or include the word "alias", especially when there's an entire system dedicated to handling that situation. I assure you I won't intentionally go out to change it, but if I ran across it during normal editing, I'd move the alias to Other Information and keep the birth/legal name in vitals.
What I am referring to here is an actual full name recorded in parish register entries - like "Reason alias Hucks". When I encountered this for the first time, I wrote to the secretary of a local history society (located in the area of the parish in question) and she advised me this was merely an earlier way of recording what might be otherwise shown as a double-barrelled name. This was not just a case of a person (well, whole family in fact) being known by one name or the other. In that case I would show (say) William Hucks in the Vitals section and William Reason as an Alternate name. No, the whole name in this format was used for generations. As it was occasionally reversed in order, I agree I should probably show it as "William Reason alias Hucks under "Vitals" and as "William Hucks alias Reason" as the Alternate Name. After all, if you were to find somebody today (the example above relates to the 17th/18th century) as "William Reason-Hucks", surely you would not show the family name as "(William) Hucks" in Vitals and "(William) Reason" as an Alternate?
I understand your comments on this specific subject, but hope I have clarified why I believe "alias" should be part of the "Last Names" (as it is called on the person page - my italics) field - i.e., as this was a common 16th-early 18th century format (written that way in parish registers), then (usually*) used instead of how it would now appear - as a double-barrelled name. So, I would ask you, and others, not to consider editing it from the format which actually was the "birth/legal" name in that period of time.
(* Of course there are examples where a person went by, say, two separate names during their lifetime - and were recorded as, say, "Thomas Smith alias William Brown", even in a register - yes, show these as one name for the Vitals and one as Alternate. But I am not talking about this type of "alias" here - just examples which were used for/by a whole family, perhaps for multiple generations.)
1 -
I have another example of why the name fields should be as flexible as possible. Sometimes the word "alias" IS part of the name.
The Hof naming system that was used in Westphalia could produce the following:
Maria Schmidt marries Johann Witte.
Johann Witte's name is changed. It can be written in many ways, including "Johann Witte alias Schmidt", "Johann Witte d. Schmidt" ('d' is for dicta), "Johann Witte mod. Schmidt", or sometimes he eventually became "Johann Schmidt"
Maria Schmidt's name stays the same. Although it was sometimes written, "Maria wife of Schmidt".
Also note: It is the HUSBAND with the "maiden" name.
0 -
@RTorchia, the examples I'm talking about are not multi-word surnames. They're multiple surnames. The one name has absolutely no relation to the other, except for applying to the same person. For example, I recently encountered a family named Tóth Horváth "Slovak Croatian". If the field label were singular, people would absolutely be confused about where to put such names. (Heck, I'd be at least somewhat perturbed.)
I could 100% get behind a proposal to relabel the fields as "Given Name(s)" and "Surname(s)", however. That'd help with the current mental-whiplash-inducing situation when the name's language is set to Hungarian, which switches the boxes around but leaves the positional labels.
(In fact, I discovered when I edited this name for the screenshot -- more or less at random -- that it had been entered wrong way 'round, with Joseph Anton in the Last Names box and Nonner in the First Names box. Because the rest of the family is set to German or Other, it looked correct.)
The parenthetical plural would at least let people know that a single name is generally expected, but that more than one is also good. However, what's really needed is a help link or at least tooltip for each field, present whether one is entering a new profile or editing an existing one. People would of course ignore such hints most of the time, but there's no getting around that.
1