Family search historical name different than principle name

LegacyUser

Donald Allen Soper said: While attaching a historical record to family tree, I find the historical record has a complete principles name i.e middle name and the selected person only shows the middle name. I attach the record and then return to my principle person’s vitals and manually change the middle name.
I often see a source for a person when the same situation has occurred but the name was not changed to reflect the additional information. Either they forgot to make the change or it was too much work.
As I look at the historical record, I see a simple programming change that would resolve this.

LegacyUser

Juli said: What you're attaching is not what's in the historical record. It's what's in the _index_ of the historical record. It may very well be wrong, and even if it isn't, it may disagree with other historical records about the same person. Therefore, what you're trying to suggest cannot and should not be implemented.

LegacyUser

Donald Allen Soper said: 'my experience is that the complete name helps in finding more info.

LegacyUser

Jennifer Jeffris said: It should be optional.

LegacyUser

Tom Huber said: While that is true, it is immaterial to your request of being able to update the name (or any field that has an existing entry) with the indexed information. The point is that the index for a historical record can contain inaccurate information, which is why Juli's comment really applies to this request (and it is a common request).

LegacyUser

Tom Huber said: In an open-edit system like FamilySearch Family Tree, there are a lot of inexperienced (and I am not saying you are one) users who want to take a lot of shortcuts to make things faster and easier.

Properly recording and maintaining a record should never make use of shortcuts because inexperienced users will use those and make a mess of things.

As it is, I am still correcting sources that were attached that do not belong to the person involved, but were attached because a record hint was provided and the inexperienced user (who I know) went happily about attaching the sources, some of which could not possibly apply to the family (wrong country).

LegacyUser

Jeff Wiseman said: Hi Donald,

You probably should be careful about putting too much emphasis on treating a person's name as an absolute. A unique person is defined by the combination of their name along with ALL of their other Vitals (including relationships).

For example, I have an entire family (parents and 10 Children) that immigrated to the US in the 1800's. All immigration and pre-immigration records show them with the structure of first name, middle name, and European surname. Sometime during the first several years that they were in the US, they started reversing their first and middle names. Also because their surname was hard to pronounce, they also started using a surname that was phonetically similar, but spelled different.

As a result, a single member of that family would typically show up on different records with their names structured in the following different ways:
First Middle Lastone
First M. Lastone
F. M. Lastone
First Lastone
F. Lastone
First Middle Lasttwo
First M. Lasttwo
F. M. Lasttwo
First Lasttwo
F. Lasttwo
Middle First Lastone
Middle F. Lastone
M. F. Lastone
Middle Lastone
M. Lastone
Middle First Lasttwo
Middle F. Lasttwo
M. F. Lasttwo
Middle Lasttwo
M. Lasttwo.

That is TWENTY permutations in the name for the SAME PERSON! Furthermore, the above list does not even include all of the ADDITIONAL permutations introduced because of the use of nicknames and incorrectly indexed names (e.g., indexing a handwritten "L" as a "C" or vice-versa and letters that get scrambled).

Even birth registers frequently only show first or middle initials, and sometimes only the last name itself (or "infant"). Also the above list of permutations don't show other subtleties as when a person was known both by an European first or middle name that got phonetically transposed after moving to the US.

So now you have the potential of 50 or more different legitimate ways to spell the name of a single given person.

Obviously, if a source contains a full middle name where you only had an initial before, it can be advantageous to update the name citing the source where you got the information. But what if that middle name spelling was only used in one of dozens of historical records? What does that mean? If you include it in searches, you might find that you get FEWER hits than if you leave it out.

I have seen other examples of the following. A family has two Benjamin F. Smiths in it. However, one of them typically shows up in historical records as Benjamin Smith, and the other as Ben F. Smith. In this situation, trying to automate the updating of the name is guaranteed to screw things up.

The fact remains that the choices in how a person's name is recorded in their vitals is non-trivial enough that it requires interpretation by a human being. Trying to automate this has a great potential in creating erroneous and misleading data.

LegacyUser

Cindy Hecker said: This is a great answer. I already see the problems of different marriage dates and locations because people just move that information over and it overrides the most correct and standardized location. I do not want it too easy! I want it correct.

LegacyUser

Jeff Wiseman said: Actually, at present, moving marriage information across does not actually "override" the original information, it actually creates a whole new event. That means that you need to go in and deleted the redundant event if it is in fact the same married couple. This is useful when the same couple gets marriage a second time (which DOES occur occasionally).

A Couple relationship can have MULTPLE events, and although you can record them all, the system currently does not display them well (especially in the time line view).

LegacyUser

Paul said: The fact that a marriage event can be carried over is not a good idea at all. It often leads to a perfectly correct input, relating to the actual marriage, being moved off the person page(s) by one that relates to banns, licence, etc. An earlier date takes precedence regarding display. As with other vitals, I would like there not be the ability to carry further marriage details across, so the user would be forced to return to the person(s) concerned and evaluate evidence for the correct date (or preferred one, in the case where a couple were genuinely married on two separate occasions).

LegacyUser

Paul said: Sorry, just noticed Cindy has already made this point, but no harm in emphasising the problems this ability can create.