Can the family tree go back to having all actual surnames capitalized?
In earlier years, like the PAF, the surname was always capitalized; and the given names were lower case except for the first letter of each name. Often I have found an ancestor's name with a surname as a given name besides the actual surname line. For example, my ancestor is Florence Jones Ferguson. I have hundreds of ancestors with two or more surnames in their full names. In this case, Florence Jones are given names and Ferguson is the family surname. It would be helpful, especially where there are not lines or rectangles (in most areas other than the "name" first entered) to clarify the full surname - as Florence Jones FERGUSON. Often there are more than one name for the surname, like in some Quebec names. For example, Joseph Pierre Meunier dit Bergeron; it would be clearer as Joseph Pierre MEUNIER DIT BERGERON. A Suggestion is to always have whatever name(s) are typed in the "Surname" area when one is at first adding a new ancestor to the Family Tree; that that/those surname(s) be automatically capitalized. It could clear up some confusion on following the family surname.
Answers
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I have encountered situations where this might have helped, but some users are likely to complete the Name fields in their chosen way regardless of any FamilySearch advice.
Capitalisation of surnames is widely practised in some circumstances: I frequently use it myself when writing messages that reference surnames of the families being discussed. However, I do feel the appearance is much neater when applied consistently to both First and Last Name fields - in Family Tree and elsewhere.
As far as "automatic" capitalisation goes, this would not reflect the way individuals write / wrote their own surname(s), especially in accordance to the practice in different countries. I am thinking particularly of names prefixed by such terms as "van der" and "de", which I find are more usually written (all) in lower case. (Perhaps your example of "dit" also falls into that category.)
So, while I have found names that have been incorrectly split between the two Name fields (occasionally a user even putting the whole of the name in the First Name field and leaving the Last Name field blank), on balance I would prefer to see the current recommended practice continued, in spite of your well presented case for the contrary.
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In discussions of surname capitalization, it is valuable to maintain the distinction between how names are entered and stored, and how they are displayed.
Entering names in all uppercase is a poor practice that leads to inaccurate and inconsistent data. For example, the surname MacDonald is not distinguished from the surname Macdonald if written in all uppercase. Similarly, some immigrants to America now spell their name Von Hagen, while others retain the original von Hagen.
Although there are uppercase versions of French accented letters, many people adopt the long-standing convention of dropping accents for uppercase letters. So the surname Hébert would be HEBERT in uppercase. Converting that to lowercase would be Hebert, which is different from Hébert. There are also similar issues with the Turkish dotless I and a few other characters with diacritical marks.
In the collaborative tree, the safest approach for entering and storing accurate data is to follow the recommendation in the article How do I enter names in Family Tree to "use normal capitalization."
That said, I'm not opposed to considering adding an option for surnames to be displayed in all uppercase. Many desktop applications (such as the aforementioned PAF) provide that option. I would personally never use it, but I understand why some people like that display. As long as names are properly entered in mixed case, that option wouldn't bother me.
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I would counsel caution over the question of what the surname actually is. For instance, my friend's family followed the typical Anglo-Irish practice of using a previous family surname as a middle given name. For instance, Arthur Bailey Chesters (a made-up name, here). Chesters is the surname in this example and Bailey a given name derived from an ancestor's surname.
Then the Bailey (say) started getting fixed for all children and it becomes difficult, depending on what document you're looking at, to know whether the later surname is "Chesters" or "Bailey Chesters" (because 2 part names don't have to be hyphenated). Indeed, when looking at certain Civil Registration indexes, where it should have been possible from the format to know what the surname was, I found two sisters where one was surnamed "Chesters" and the other "Bailey Chesters". I suspect that it wasn't the family making that decision but the Registrar.
So it's one of those things where making the surname "obvious" may in fact be misleading because later readers take the capitalised surname as correct, because it's so obvious, but reality may not actually support such certainty.
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i hope not.
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