How to document a person with multiple official names?
My paternal grandfather had multiple name changes over his lifetime. At least four name changes. Different official documents (birth, naturalization, census, marriage, death, etc.) have different names. For example, his given name was Pasquale which he changed to Charles at some point. The last name changed dramatically as well.
How is this tracked in a family tree? Is it his final name that is used since it match the next generations?
Best Answer
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There is no rule that covers all situations, but there are things to consider. Is there a name that most people living today know him as? Is there a name found the most often in records during his adult life? Were the name changes legal or due to a difficulty with spelling (I only ask as I have a Polish brother in law and everyone in his family has spelled their names multiple ways, even my brother in law himself), or were the changes for some other reason?
I would consider the questions above, and then pick the name you want to appear. Remember, you are doing this so people learn more about your grandfather, not to satisfy any "rule" about names. I would make a point to put all other names in the "Other Information" section with notes about then they were used and why they were changed, if you know. You can tag sources to the alternate name facts.
Myself, I have a grandfather in law who also had 4 versions of his name, but 3 of them were spelling variants of his Greek name. He changed his name completely when he was naturalized in 1924. I chose to use one of the Greek variants as the basic name for him. His children also had their names changed when he was naturalized. For them I have chosen to use the naturalized name because they all lived their entire adult lives with the new name.
For another ancestor who had a name change during adulthood, I doggedly have given him his birth name. When I began my family history hobby, I was told by my in-laws that this person abandoned his family and no one knew anything. I have since uncovered the fact that he remarried after leaving his family, and both he and his second wife changed their name after their marriage, presumably to better hide from their first spouses (but I don't know that for certain). The family living today was quite horrified to discover the truth, so THAT guy stays visible with his old name that the living today knew him as, and the same for his second wife. I have an alternate name fact for both him and his second wife.
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The only thing I want to add to Gail's excellent advice is to point out that FS's Find function treats all of a profile's names equivalently, regardless of which one happens to be in the Vitals box. If I search for Harry Houdini, it shows Harry Houdini in the search results. If I search for Ehrich Weisz, then it shows him as Ehrich Weisz. I have to look at the profile to see which name is in Vitals.
In general, it's simplest to stick with birth names for Vitals: everyone had (at least) one of those. (And sometimes we even know what it was.) But I think it's important to not treat this as some sort of hard-and-fast rule. We don't want to set off on The Eternal Quest for a person's One True Name At Birth (like people often seem to, over on WikiTree), because, just like the Holy Grail, the One True Name may be purely mythical.
As an example, my grandmother was born a year and a half before her parents got married. By the laws of the time and place, her surname for those eighteen months was her mother's. However, the marriage retroactively legitimized her: her surname was legally declared to have been her father's that whole time. So which one is her "true" birth name? (I've gone with her father's surname, since that's the only name she actually ever used; I haven't even entered the pre-legal-time-machine one as an alternate, as that would just be too confusing.)
In looking through my fan chart, and my spouse's, I see that I've broken the birth-name-in-Vitals rule-of-thumb more often than I've kept it: for people who deliberately changed their names as adults, I've consistently used their chosen names for Vitals. I don't have anyone who made multiple such choices, though, so I'm not sure what I'd do there. (Well, pick one end or the other, obviously, but which end, birth or death?)
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