When editing a person's name in the tree, should I set the language to the language of the person's
Answers
-
@Richard Otter
Richard
ONLY if you want to enter the details in that particular Language ...
[ ie. Character set ]
And, of course, you know that Language ...
Otherwise, you could make a 'meal of it' ...
Just my thoughts.
Brett
ps: Take it or leave it, each to there own
pps: I would not be game, unless I understood the Language.
0 -
So, if a German name contains one of the special characters found in the German alphabet, it should be marked as German.
0 -
@Richard Otter
Richard
That is your choice ...
IF, you know the German Character Set; THEN, by all means, you certainly can ...
As far as I am aware, such could also be entered from the 'keyboard' ...
[ If one know how ... ]
Rather than changing the "Language" in 'FamilySearch'.
Otherwise, just do the best you can ...
Brett
0 -
Changing the language setting doesn't allow different characters to be entered. One can enter any character even if the language is set to English. (And by the way, use of international keyboard layouts is easy in MacOS, Windows and Android)
I am asking this to find out if there are other significant side-effect/benefits for properly setting the language variable.
I don't see any documentation for this so it seems some people will use it, many won't. That can't be the intention of the designer...
Thanks for trying to help. This is really a question for the software architect or the documentation specialist.
0 -
I don't know if this helps with the question.
But, when we index we are given instructions to use the international keyboard and also special instructions on some projects.
For example, on a current German project we are given a specific instruction about possessives:
- Do not include possessive name suffixes, such as "-in," "-en," "-s," or "-ens," when you type names. Type the root form of the name only. For example, for "der Katharina Müllerin," type the name "Müllerin" as Müller, or for "des Martin Schmidts," type the name "Schmidts" as Schmidt.
The General Indexing Guidelines are always the same for every language:
Diacritics and Other Characters
- If the name of a person or place was written with a character not on your keyboard, such as the "ò" in Nicolò, the "æ" in Kræmer, or the "ç" in François, please insert the character by going to the indexing toolbar and clicking the International characters icon and then clicking the character you want to insert.
0 -
The International Characters are VERY hard to read... I do a lot of German indexing, and need to be able to add the "umlaut" characters (vowels with 2 dots above them). However, in many cases I can't differentiate between the characters because the script is so small... Can Family Search add a feature to allow the International Characters to be magnified, like the record itself?
0 -
I set the language to the predominant language of the attached historical records (except when the language is Church Latin). In the case of immigrants with name changes, I use an Alternate Name field.
0 -
My grandmother's line has siblings whose names were changed in America. So was my grandmother's! Volunteer emuowens is changing the American names (used for the Names under Vitals in Details) of my grandmother's siblings to their names at birth. Already he has changed L2YY-FLF from Emma to (born) Ambjor and L2YY-DYG from Sarah to (born) Sigrid. He has added to L2YY-21V the middle name (at birth Aadel) for Guri. Which is better (especially for Immigrants) for the Names under Vitals in Details? The American names or the names at birth?
0 -
@CarolFlaherty2, there seem to be two major schools of thought about what belongs in the primary name slot in genealogy: either the birth (or earliest known) name, or the best-known name. The birth/earliest option has the advantage of being mostly not subject to opinion, while the best-known option has the advantage of clarity (for some subset of people, anyway).
There is a third option: the name fields on FamilySearch can all hold multiple names, i.e. you could enter "Sigrid Sarah" in the "first names" field. (I wouldn't do this with something like "Johann John", because that's the same name twice, just in different languages.) However, I think I'd only do this if the surname stayed the same. For example, if a hypothetical Knut Larsen decided the heck with it, he'd be Charles in English, then his name under Vitals would make sense as "Knut Charles Larsen". It doesn't work as well when Sigrid Knudsdatter becomes Sarah Slayton after immigration and marriage; for her, I think the current setup works best: birth/maiden name under Vitals, and married name under Other.
1 -
By the way, we have the same immigrant grandmother L2P2-ZDG. Her birth name was Gunvor. Her immigrant-name was Gertrude. Soon he will probably change the Name (Gertrude) under Vitals in Details to Gunvor. I want to have an answer before he takes that action!
0 -
I have read through this thread, and I don't see the legalities brought into it. If an ancestor migrated from someplace to someplace and the giving up of old citizenship / obtaining new citizenship was involved, their most recent legal name should be used. In the USA this is often a shortened "Americanized" version, but I have one instance where the naturalization judge forced a Greek ancestor to take a completely different name just because the judge didn't permit names he didn't know how to say. In the AKA should be their birth name, and I will QUICKLY ADD, all the variations of THAT. Old countries didn't all care about spelling.
0 -
There are no rules for this. Only personal preference, someone declaring a "standard" that really isn't, and outdated manuals.
See for example these rules, most of which are not in the least recommended anymore nor needed in Family Tree: https://www.thoughtco.com/properly-record-names-in-genealogy-4083357
The goal for a name is to identify someone. Whether that is a person's name at birth or at age 90 often depends on your point of view. If someone's focus is the person's grandparents, parents, and siblings, then using the birth name makes the most sense. Likewise if one's focus is searching for pre immigration records. If someone's focus is the person's spouse, children and grandchildren, then using the name on the death certificate makes most sense. Likewise if one's focus is searching for post-imigration records.
Here's another example of someone setting forth a standard: https://www.columbinegenealogy.com/pdfs/Getting%20It%20Right.pdf who declares, "A birth name establishes the identity of an individual in a genealogy database."
I would say, ignore all advice and legalities, decide what works best in each particular situation, make full use of the Alternate Name in Other Information where you can have dozens of names if you need to, keeping in mind that all search routines, hinting routines, and possible duplicate routines use all alternate names. And when a cousin who did not immigrate and knows a person only by that person's birth name feels that should be in the vitals field and you think the post-immigration name should be used, have a civil discussion about that one person and come to a mutual agreement as to what is best to use.
My own personal preference is to always put the birth name under vitals and all names used later in life under Other Information. I think, looking at your examples, that Ambjør and Sigrid are best to have under the Vitals section, with the multiple alternate names clarifying the situation.
2 -
Gordon, those "rules" make me want to write an article on "Things Genealogists Believe about __ (That Are Wrong)".
For example, that PDF style guide says to always enter at least three levels of jurisdiction for placenames. Um, what if there aren't three? (Budapest, Hungary after 1950 comes to mind: it's not part of any county and has no other administrative level besides the city and country.)
And the way both guides blissfully assume that everyone has a middle name, or that a married woman always assumes her husband's family name (with no other changes to any other part of her name), or that everyone has a surname and it always comes after the given name....
So yeah, as you said, there are no rules; if anyone tries to tell you otherwise, don't believe it. There are simply too many options for any generalizations to be useful.
1 -
I started to write a response to @Gordon Collett telling him it was a well thought out reply, yet I do try to follow the rule of the legal name and didn't want to be argumentative. I have a number of adopted relatives (I know this discussion is not that topic), and there it is critical the original name be simply informational. I guess the individuality of each ancestor is the key. BUT when searching for records, it is important to know the names over the years that were used in the places where records were kept, even when they are spelled in a crazy way. My husband's great grandfather somehow got stuck with Baldasar when his given name was variations of Balthasar. Baldasar is on many US documents and needs to be used. Looking forward to your blog, @Julia Szent-Györgyi !
1 -
There was an interesting lecture at RootsTech 2021 regarding Norwegian names at: https://www.familysearch.org/rootstech/rtc2021/session/norwegian-patronymic-names-versus-farm-names Towards the end of it, the presenter talked about what happened to Norwegian names of emigrants to America and gave the example of her own family and what happened to relatives who all shared the same Norwegian surname Norwegian name by showing this slide:
Since there are no rules, since people have strong conflicting opinions about best practices, since all names a person had at some point in life, not spelling variants or record errors but real names, are of equal importance, and since computers give us pretty well unlimited capabilities in regards to data storage and display, surely something could be done.
Several times over the years, people have asked to have more than one name in the Vitals Section. I'm going to request it again with a slight variation here: https://community.familysearch.org/en/discussion/112991/please-let-us-have-multiple-names-under-vitals/p1?new=1
0 -
The famous blog post on "Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names" (https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-believe-about-names/) is over a decade old now, and there's even a version of it with examples (https://shinesolutions.com/2018/01/08/falsehoods-programmers-believe-about-names-with-examples/), but computer systems continue to reject my name as "invalid". (This is the primary reason I do not have an account on one of the major genealogy sites. You don't accept my name, you don't get my money.)
As genealogical name setups go, FamilySearch's is fairly flexible, and doesn't enforce very many of the falsehoods in that article. (It doesn't like numerals, which is number 15.) The main problem with it is the use of ordinal labels (first name, last name), which do not translate across cultures and get Really, Really Confusing when you're using the English interface to enter a name in a surname-first language:
(I cannot count how often I've managed to get myself totally turned around as to which name goes where in that setup, especially when switching back and forth between languages in partial-immigrant families.)
The dangers of generalizing American practices to the rest of the world is best illustrated by the utter chaos that is WikiTree's names structure. It tries to enforce not only several of the falsehoods (most notably 20: people share a name with their relatives, and 32: names are assigned at birth), but also many of those antiquated style rules that Gordon dug up (such as the ones about maiden names and parentheses).
I guess my point is that there aren't any rules because there simply can't be any. People around the globe just do things too many different ways.
(Trivia: that Japanese name in number 39 is Tanaka Taro, who is a space alien in a children's manga.)
1
