Name Meaning on the New About Page in the Tree
Some of my genealogy students have had quite a laugh, at my expense, in my genealogy class last night thanks to the "Name Meaning" on my about page. While I served in the waters off Vietnam in 1974, I am about as far away from being Vietnamese as you can get. I know it is probably an automated thing, but someone might want to take a closer look at the two-word surname types and not focus on the first word of the surname. Might end up being more useful. Mine isn't. The surname is Van Horn, two words and yes, it does appear in the surname block that way.
Thank you and the new pages look interesting.
Answers
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There have been other complaints from people with Dutch names about the, um, unintelligence of the fluff page's "Name Meaning" pane.
But it is the fluff page, so other than the time line and soon the Life Sketch (or whatever they're renaming it as), it can and should all just be ignored. I hope that one day, FamilySearch will concede that those auto-generated generic encyclopedia look-ups are an insult to their users' intelligence, but I don't expect that day to be soon.
(Specific to the "Name Meaning" pane, I object even to the title or label, because names don't have meanings. You don't expect a woman named Holly to be glossy green and prickly. Names have etymologies or derivations, and often, there are multiple possibilities, even within a single language/culture. When you add the entire globe's various names, you really cannot determine whether an American surnamed Lee descends from an Englishman who lived near a meadow, or from a Chinese immigrant whose ancestor lived near a plum tree.)
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