Maiden name or married name
I'm new here and I'm not sure if I'm supposed to use my maiden name or my married name.
Answers
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Thank your for your post.
We recommend entering a women's maiden name, whether it is yours or another female ancestor. This helps the system look for records for them with that name. By entering a spouse, it will also look for her with her married name. You can also add her married name, a nickname, a legal name change, etc,. in the Other Information section of her detail page. Below is a link from the Help Center article about this.
Below are a couple more Help Center articles that might help.
Hopefully these articles will have answered your questions!
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The name displayed when you make a contribution on Family Tree needn't have anything to do with any of your real names. My cousin's son uses a mashup of a Latin phrase, and many people use various combinations of initials and numbers. (I use my married name, because it seems to help keep my spouse's Famous Relative from getting too many spurious edits from wannabe relatives.)
What you enter for yourself on your FS account and on Family Tree is totally up to you; nobody will see it, just like nobody will see what you enter about living people. (I only use maiden names on the tree, including for myself.)
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- Hi - I have an issue with another user regarding recording of last names. Family Search guidance is that for "Last Names", just enter the family name or surname. If a woman changed her surname after marriage, enter her maiden name. If the person has no last name, leave the Last Name field blank.
- Whenever I add a woman's maiden name for one particular tree, another user keeps changing the last name to show both her married and maiden name (eg Smith born Jones, or Smith born Jones formerly Brown).
- I have contacted the other user and he refuses to change his process. Surely all that additional data affects the FS search algorithms? And it looks awful !
- Is there anything that can be done to get the other user to observe the mandated naming conventions?
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@Fam_Searcher999, nothing much is "mandated" on FamilySearch's Family Tree. A profile must have a name and a deceased/living status, and that's about it -- and by "a name", they mean at least one character in one of the two name fields. Yes, you could create a profile with nothing but an X for the given ("first") name and no surname ("last name").
For the "Smith born Jones formerly Brown" profiles, have you tried entering the married names under Other Information? What does the other user do with those? That's where those names belong, and as you suspect, that's what the hinting and searching algorithms are designed for. Perhaps pointing this out would carry some weight?
If not, the best you can do is to make sure those profiles are otherwise as correct as it is possible for them to be, with every relevant source that can be found attached, and every conclusion tagged to the relevant sources. I suppose you can set yourself a reminder to go fix the names every few months; perhaps eventually the other user will give up and not "uncorrect" them again. (In the interest of not frustrating yourself unnecessarily, I suggest concentrating only on those profiles that represent your direct relatives.)
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Hi Julia, thank you very much for your quick response. My efforts to convince the other user to see some reason has not worked - I will do as you suggest and set a reminder for every few months to review those in my direct line and amend the surnames accordingly !
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You can also share this FamilySearch Help article with the other user:
https://www.familysearch.org/en/help/helpcenter/article/how-to-enter-names-in-family-tree
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