Family Historian User Group

Family Historian treats names (and a few other things like sex) separately from 'events' and 'attributes'. The latter can be associated with dates, places, notes, etc. Name, sex, etc are treated as special and distinct (which is why they don't show up in the Events tab of the Property Dialog). That's not to say that you can't define your own custom name attributes (e.g. Married Name) if you want to - and these obviously would show up in the Event tab.

There is actually no limit to the number of names you can record for each individual, but you have to use what I call 'low-level editing' to add more than 2. The first name for a person is the one that you enter in the Name field in the Main tab of the Property Dialog. If you want to add a 2nd name, you can enter this in the 'Alt Name' field of the Detail tab. If you now go to the 'All' tab of the Property Dialog, you should see that the person has 2 names at this point. If you right-click on the text in the first row (the person's name is used effectively as the title for the record as a whole) a drop down menu appears and if you click on 'Name' in this menu, you can keep on adding yet more names indefinitely. These names will of course be shown in the 'All' tab (or in the Record Window) and can be accessed in diagrams, reports, queries, etc if you want to. But they won't show up in the Main, Detail or Events tab of the Property Dialog.

Can these alternative names be used as a way of storing alternative surnames?
Absolutely. That certainly would be one strategy. One advantage of this approach is that you have stored 'John /Sair/' as an alternative name for 'John /Sayer/' it will be found if you type 'Sair' in the 'Find Record' dialog (Edit menu) when the Search Type is 'Name/Title Search', as this search function will check all the name fields, and not just the first one. But there are advantages and disadvantages of this approach. Its up to you really.

Simon Orde List Administrator & Family Historian designer

In our family trees we have 29 variant surnames, and as many as 6 alternative surnames applied to one individual, with further variants and mixes occurring between the siblings. Most families will have similar occurrences, especially in the period before the late 1800s.
Given the unlimited space for recording names in FH,we have taken a slightly different tack. Rather than hide the alternatives, we decided to show ALL the forenames and surnames for each individual, so they appear in the record view and box diagrams at all times. We use backslashes between the alternatives Obviously, this takes up more horizontal space, but we feel that it helps to make visual matching easier, and assists searching by indicating the variants pertaining to a family group in a certain period and locality. The 'Find Record' still applies