Last name and last name changes
The advice about entering last name and alternate last name / last name changes is confusing.
In Belgium and our neighboring countries, people might be born with their mother's name as their last name (because the parents were not married) then their name changes a few days/weeks/months after when the parents do get married to their fatherś last name. this is done automatically and mentioned in the margin notes of the birth certificate.
They can be found in the index of the birth register under their motherś name, but later their marriage and death certificate are in their father's last name.
Conventionally this is denoted in the following format :
first name (last name at birth) legal last name
however in Family search this would cause an error for "illegal characters"
what is the community advice
Answers
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The FS tree has a helpful field for each person to catalog Alternate Names. We can include married names, for those women who change their surname at marriage or for others who may adopt a hyphenated surname at marriage. All the alternates will be used in a record search from the profile.
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The FamilySearch guideline is to use the legal name at the person's birth. I'm assuming that would be the name on the birth certificate. But definitely use the Alternate Names field! It's really helpful.
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The FamilySearch guidance on entering names is more nuanced than "the legal name at the person's birth." See the help article How do I enter names in Family Tree?
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Yes, thank you for listing details. (I can never find that article when I need it, or I would have linked to it myself!)
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Hello I asked a similar question on March 13 "What is a child's correct name", as the person I was researching (my great grandfather followed by my 2nd great grandfather) had different name spellings depending on which document one was looking at (birth, marriage, death registers and various census'), and these documents were not the FS version but the hard data found on ScotlandsPeople web site.
In the end, I used in the person's vitals the name that was the most dominant, whilst inserting all the other spellings in the section for name variants. Each time tagging the various documents/sources where that spelling was to be found.
If you read the answers to my question, the answer from @Alan E. Brown is I feel of particular relevance.
But I think what ever you do then you should take pains by including as much tagged sources and explanations as possible.
Regards
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Thank you all for your contributions. Spelling shift is a common problem especially in multilingual areas or areas thet are either dominated by people from another language group, or occupied by foreign countries such as the Low Countries in Europe.
Also name changes by adoption, by marriage or by other legal means/judicial decisions etc… are quite straight forward ( imho).
This particular case where the birth certificate is modified by annotation in the margin (due to another legal acte , a marriage of the parents) is obviously different.
The most obvious solution in line line with convention in the low countries would be to identify the person as First name (Last name at birth- motherś name) legal last name but that would give an error and would disrupt the Family search database.
I will use following notation method :First name = given name(s)
LNAB = father's name legal name after the annotation of the birth certificate, which is most often used in subsequent documents such as marriage acte or death certificate
other last names = mother's name initial name on the birth certificate
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So that's why they banned those parenthesis! Too many obsolete standards based on outmoded conventions. It's one thing to use one's personal favorite way of entering information in a personal tree. It's another thing altogether to be in a universal tree where a profile needs to be crystal clear to any user anywhere in the world without that user needing to wonder if that name in parenthesis is an alternate first name used prior to an adoption or other legal name change, a alternate last name, a maiden name, a previous married name, a temporary last name as discussed here, or even an occupation.
If this were my family, I would put the permanent last name as the main name under vitals and the temporary last name at birth as an alternate name. Mainly because this would give this first child the same last name on all pedigree charts as any subsequent siblings. And I would thoroughly explain everything!
As mentioned above, all program routines use all a person's names. If starting a search on FamilySearch from a person's profile page, the program even fills in up to four names automatically:
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