Greek Names & Naming in Family Search
Can you pass this on to the family search developers please. They will need to see this. Thank you.
1. Some changes have taken place with the way names are entered. Now Family search will not accept an abbreviated name like " T. Ash " or " J. Doe ". Here is the problem- In many of my Greek records It will only show the first initial of the parents name, and I cannot find what the full name is. The system will not let me put in a name with the first letter of the first name without an error message.
2. Also when entering names it would be important to have a middle name option for Greeks that allow an Initial. In Greece, if a person had a father named John, their full name would include John as their middle name. For example. I am "Tom John Ash" or "Tom J. Ash". The John tells people that my father was John. However with females when they are married they take on the first name of their husband as their middle name. So if " Cathy John Smith" (daughter of John) married Mike Sweat, her new name would be " Cathy Mike Sweat " or "Cathy M. Sweat. So Greek females may have two names one at birth and another at marriage.
So what I am asking for is an option to put in middle names in the areas of " + Add alternate name" & in the " main name area under vitals" . Also, allowing me to enter the middle initial and or name is very important and used to determine what family they came from & who they are married too.
Answers
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Just on the first point for now - where are you getting this problem. I thought it might be arising because of a period being inputted (as in T.), but I am not getting any message on whether I input the first name as T, T. or T* - please illustrate (by screenshot or URL exactly what type of search is not being accepted.
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After a quick test over on the beta site, I think the problem is that the Greek language template for names is disallowing periods.
It would be good if the template could be made a bit more flexible, but in the meantime, the workaround is easy: just omit the period.
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@Julia Szent-Györgyi You're right: the validation for the Greek language template for names is too restrictive. This is the same issue as was reported for Ukrainian: https://community.familysearch.org/en/discussion/145792/problem-with-name-language-ukrainian
That reported problem has not yet been fixed, but hopefully the fix will cover many characters for many languages.
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Family Tree has been designed to just use the first names field for all of an individual's first and middle names. It works fine to have them all there.
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Periods and many other punctuation marks in Greek should now be allowed. Thank you for bringing this to our attention.
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As @StuartDavey mentioned, we are happy to report that this has been resolved. Thank you so much for bringing this to our attention and being so patient as it was fixed. Let us know if you see anything else with Greek. They are working on additional languages and I will update as I hear. Thanks, everyone!
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