Person who lied about age (WW II) and used different middle names
Please disregard this whole post. I noticed others have used one of my persons on their tree (if you look at the IDs I gave below they are common names.) I will remove the person and all my sources and begin again. I have been chasing what I thought were 2 brothers with alarmingly close names, but birth dates 13 months apart. I finally realized they are the same person. This boy was one of 3 who grew up in an orphanage, very unfortunate, and then came of age in the late 1930's. The person in question settled on an older birth date sometime around WW II (giving himself a birth date in 1920, when it was really 1921). Even social security records the 1920 date, but by the time of his death, his daughters somehow figured it out and have his correct 1921 birth date on his gravestone. They also have the birth middle initial of M, not his acquired middle initial of B (which is also in his social security record.)
I'm not wondering what to do with the name tweaks, but I am wondering how to handle his birth date. I am sure this is NOT unusual as many young men lied about their age to get into the Army in 1942, and the false birth dates likely followed them for some time as well. Is there a recommended date to be used on the record, or should I just pick one? If that is the case, I will pick the one his daughters put on his marker, which has a proper birth index to back it up.
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I'm so sorry, I violated one of the rules by not leaving the record IDs. I still have him in 2 records, and will be merging them when I can figure out how to handle the birth dates. GS98-PTH and GZ1Z-27B are the 2 records which eventually will be merged. Luckily I have only put the wife on one record, so I won't have to merge them. That is how I discovered they might be the same person. In ancestry they had wives with remarkably similar names as well as daughters with the same name. LOL
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I'm going to expand on this as I realize I need to adjust something I put in my first post. I said I wasn't worried about what to do with names, but I realize I have 4 people who "fiddled" with their first and middle names during the 1930's leading into World War II. Are there any standards regarding what should be shown as the main name and which as alternate? My gut tells me to put as the main name the one everyone still alive uses to refer to them. In case anyone is wondering, this is the result of a rather convoluted family situation. They were broken apart, and did not reunite until way after WW II.
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You might find this help article useful.
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