US—City and Business Directories, 1749–1990, add spouse's last name if woman is a widow.

LegacyUser

Allyson Bunny Whitney said: Re: Indexing "US—City and Business Directories, 1749–1990". The instructions say not to put a last name in the spouse's name if the main entry is widowed. Ex: "Smith, Catherine wid John". That would mean John (Smith) will not be searchable, or if you search for "John" would bring up thousands of Johns, with no last name. Unless you plan on auto-populating John's last name, if a person didn't know Catherine's name, you would not able to find John.

Suggest you either auto-populate spouse's last name, or change the instructions to include the spouse's last name.

nw1999

We are to index what we see and not to assume any surnames if it is not on the record.

LegacyUser

Juli said: The reason the instructions say not to enter John's surname in such a case is that you do not know it: how do you know whether Smith is Catherine's maiden or married name? (Yes, there are conventions about this sort of thing. Some of them do it one way, some of them do it exactly the opposite way.)

If all you know about someone is that she's Mrs. John Smith, you can search for surname = Smith and spouse's given name = John.