What is considered a "legal name change"?
FamilySearch says to add the last legal name in the Vitals section (except for maiden name).
When a name has evolved through several versions due to moving to a new country, would the marriage record or death record be considered the last legal name?
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Or you could put their birth names in the Vitals section and put the rest under Other Information. Or you could put the name most people would have known them by in Vitals. The choice is totally up to you and all your close relatives that might be working on the same people to come to a consensus as to the best, least confusing choice which might be different for each individual.
There are no hard and fast rules.
The Help Center article regarding this: https://www.familysearch.org/en/help/helpcenter/article/how-to-enter-names-in-family-tree is vague:
- In the Vitals section, enter the birth name or complete legal name.... [or]
- Legal name changes—If a person legally changed his or her name, other than through marriage, enter the newer legal name. [or]
- Most commonly used name—If the person did not use his or her legal name in life, enter the commonly used name in the Vitals section. Enter the legal name in the Other Information section.
In this context "legal name change" means the person went to court and officially had his or her name changed from one name to another with a legal document regarding the fact. It does not mean drifting spellings or someone just on their own starting to use a new variant of a name.
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A marriage record or death record for a married woman would not be necessary. What we consider a name change would be when someone legally changes their name or it gets changed when they come into a country. This happened frequently when someone entered the United States from another country long ago.
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Most of my Ukrainian ancestors went through several versions of their names, especially since their alphabet doesn't have a direct correlation to the English alphabet.
Birth records are rare, so the earliest record is the immigration/passenger records and has the first version of their name. Then the names go several different spellings until finally some just adopt an English name. For example: Synyszyn/Senyshyn/Seneshen/Sanderson.
No legal documents were filed to change the names. They just started using a different spelling or name. So, sometimes each record/document out there has a different name. Since legal proceedings were not used, would the different names on the vital records (birth, marriage, death) be considered a "legal name change"? If so, then whatever version of their name they used on the death record/headstone would be the last "legal name"?
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Even though there is only one name recorded in the Vitals section, you can add any number of names in the "Alternate Names" sub-section of the "Other Information" section. That way the system can search for records under whichever name the records may have used during different stages/time periods of their life. In many cases, particularly in the non-recent past, a person may have been recorded under a name other than what we would now consider to be their "legal name".
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So, just to be clear, I should use the last version of their name in the Vitals section of FamilySearch and put all the other versions in the Alternate Name section?
In the example I gave above, Synyszyn/Senyshyn/Seneshen/Sanderson, the father's death record/headstone uses Senyshyn, but all the children use different versions of the name on their death records/headstones. So in this case, each family member would have a different name in the Vitals section. It seems very confusing.
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@Roberta Gillard McClung, yes, it can get confusing, but I prefer to look on the bright side: I can make the choice that best suits the particulars. As Gordon said, there are no hard and fast rules on FS.
In general, I basically follow that Help Center article's guidelines: I use birth or maiden names in the Vitals box, except in the case of legal name changes. The definition of a "legal name change" varies by time and place; my dad requested the change on his naturalization (after five years of nobody being able to pronounce either part of his name), my spouse's grandfather filed the request with the Hungarian Ministry of the Interior in 1941, and remarkably, two of my spouse's great-great-great-grandfathers on the other side each followed much the same Interior Ministry procedure in 1846 and 1848. (The latter affected only the family name; the given name he simply adopted at some point after 1828 but before 1837.)
Sometimes, yes, such a legal name change results in different surnames for different children. For example, when my grandfather Hungarianized his surname in 1935, his father and brother followed suit, so they're on FS with the new name -- but his youngest brother died in 1930, so he's entered on FS with the original family name.
If, after application of the broad birth-or-legal guidelines, there are still multiple possible choices for the Vitals box, I try to go for recognizability: what would most of this person's relatives be most likely to recognize? Or, what would the person have picked as "yes, that's me"? It helps in this regard that until very recently (by genealogical standards, anyway), Hungarian married names were strictly "Mrs. HisGiven HisFamily". ("HerGiven HisFamily" was only added as an official possibility about 50 years ago.) This makes the choice easy for most women, since their own, personal names were the ones they were given at birth, not their married names.
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So in this case, each family member would have a different name in the Vitals section. It seems very confusing.
History is messy. Families are messy. That means family history can make you tear your hair out sometimes.
Ancient genealogists using ancient paper forms with tiny blanks dealt with this by imposing oversimplified, artificial standards. One of the great things about Family Tree is that it allows us to embrace and celebrate the real history of our families in all its messiness squared.
For example, old paper forms had a single five inch line to record a person's name. FamilySearch allows names at least as long as this one created in beta:
I don't know how much longer I could have gone. I also don't know how many Alternate Names we can enter, but if it's like other types of data on the site, it's probably around two hundred and fifty names.
As another example, I've always been suspicious that it was the limitations those old paper forms that led to someone decades ago declaring that Norwegian last names that were derived from the farm a person lived on were not real names and should never be recorded even though they were real names and were used as real names. That now unknown someone using those forms probably just could not cope with the fact that if a family moved five times during their child bearing years, then their five children would each have a different birth last name.
The big key is proper use of reason statements to explain exactly what you are doing and why:
Note that I still have 1,202 more characters I could use to explain this person's name. (No, I never actually get this detailed. I do have other things I need to get done in life. But I can when I need to.)
So again, just decide what works best for your family then explain yourself. If for no other reason so that when you look back at a profile ten years from now you can see why you did what you did.
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I would echo what has been said in various responses: more important than where you put a name (in Vitals or in Alternate Names) is that you document ALL the various possible names. (within reason: every little spelling variation does NOT need to be included; that just clutters everything unnecessarily) What you place in the Vitals section does not have to be what we nowadays would consider the legal name, just as long as that name at least appears in the Alternate Names with an explanation of where it is used. My general rule of thumb is to use a name, as has been suggested, that the person themselves is likely to have used if someone asked "what's your name". I will scan through the names that are used in the list of source records, giving some deference to a name that appears more frequently than others, and giving particular deference to a name used in a marriage record, reasoning that the person, moreso than in other other records, is more likely to be there in person stating their name. Birth names, as given by parents at a christening, can sometimes be "flowery" extended names (mimicing nobility) that the person never really used in everyday life. I tend to side with the "everyday" name...
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You say:
"every little spelling variation does NOT need to be included; that just clutters everything unnecessarily"
Whilst I admit I generally go along with this when thinking whether I should enter an Alternate Name for an individual, it is not necessarily always good advice. I just tested with the name BEARDSALL, which - in the registers for the same parish - has BEARDSHALL as a variant spelling. Without entering an individual named Beardsall with an Alternate Name of Beardshall, he was not identified using the FIND feature. I have also found (on both FamilySearch and other websites) many other instances where a single difference / addition of a letter does not produce the expected results (using soundex / similar name options, etc.).
So, whilst we shouldn't have to be so fussy about including variants of this nature, in many instances it certainly helps in producing positive search results.
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Name variations are a slippery slope.
Some choices are easy: if Kandel was changed to Nyiri, that should definitely be entered somewhere on the profile, as there's no reason to connect those names otherwise. But should the matching algorithm's known literal-minded obstinacy about -i versus -y mean that I should enter an alternate name of Nyiry on all (several dozen) Nyiris in the family? And what about the fact that the K in Kandel was sometimes misread as an R by indexers? Should I enter an alternate name of Randel?
I'm ignoring the fact that phonetically, it's Nyíri, with a long í in the first syllable -- you really can't tell i from í in handwriting, and FS's matching algorithms ignore diacritics anyway.
In general, I'm too lazy (and ornery) to enter Nyiry as an alternate for Nyiri. I keep hoping that the Search and Find algorithms will be "taught" that those are Exactly The Same Thing -- and in the meantime, the hinting system sometimes figures it out. The latter also "knows" about K versus R and other common indexing errors, so I definitely don't enter alternate names to correspond with mistakes.
I suppose "different Soundex" could be a good rule of thumb for when to enter a variant. Nyiri and Nyiry have the same code, N600, so I'd be off the hook.
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