Family Historian User Group

I've been doing some tidying up recently and have discovered an issue with personal names - see the example in this screenshot: I originally had this person entered as Hellen Meaburn, since that was the version found in the baptism and burial registers and on her memorial. However, the GRO index has the name as Eleanor, so I changed it in the Names & Titles dialogue from the Main tab of the Property Box, and added Hellen as an alternative name.

However, when I later looked at the All tab (as in the screenshot), I was quite surprised to see that it still showed a Given name with the original spelling underneath the edited name. There's also the capitalised version of the surname as originally imported from RootsMagic, which I fixed with the Surname Case Convert plugin. (Incidentally, this appears to have been pulled - is that anything to worry about?)

Before investigating further, my first thought was there was something wrong with FH's name editing functions, and that the plugin hadn't worked properly, but I can now see that that isn't the case. It appears that these fields came across in the .ged file I imported from RootsMagic: In FH they can be found in a query with the data references %INDI.NAME[1].GIVN% and %INDI.NAME[1].SURN% (possibly also %INDI.NAME[2].GIVN% etc but I haven't looked for that yet). People that I've entered from scratch in FH don't have those fields, and editing the names in the Names & Titles dialogue doesn't change them - not surprisingly, since that presumably operates on FH's own name fields, such as %INDI.NAME[1]:GIVEN%, %INDI.NAME[1]:GIVEN_ALL% and %INDI.NAME[1]:SURNAME%. The Surname Case Convert plugin also evidently didn't affect them.

It therefore appears to me that these fields are unnecessary in FH, but could someone more knowledgeable than me confirm that, please? And if they are unnecessary, presumably it will be safe to simply delete them en bloc?

Thanks for any advice on this.

I've experienced the same problem when importing Gedcoms created with other software. I've not noticeably suffered when deleting the additional fields.

Just use a Query to display them and then select the column cells and press the delete key to remove them. As you suggested they were most likely imported from another program.

Thank you, Craig and Jane. Since FH doesn't seem to be doing anything with or to these fields, I didn't expect there to be a problem, but I thought it as well to check.

The Name field and its subsidiary fields are a bit inconsistent, but are mostly standard required Gedcom fields.
The one exception is the Given Name Used (_USED) sub-field, which is an FH invention.

Gedcom says the sub-fields are optionally used to define name parts that cannot be defined in the Name field itself.
In FH the Name field defines the Given forenames and the /Surname/.
So the All tab sub-fields Given (GIVN) and Surname (SURN) are redundant.
On the All tab there is also a Surname Prefix (SPFX) sub-field that is rarely used.
The Names & Title dialogue has the better supported sub-fields:
Name Prefix (NPFX) , Name Suffix (NSFX) , Nickname (NICK) & Given Name Used (_USED)

All those sub-fields can all be accessed via suitable data references.
Those in the Names & Title dialogue can be combined by using qualifiers such as :ADORNED and :GIVEN and :PREFERRED

Other products use those sub-fields in different ways to FH and as they are standard Gedcom fields FH will import them without complaint, but standard Reports and Diagrams will not mention them unless customised to so.

I am not sure where the Surname Case Convert plugin came from, or went to, but there is Clean up Surname Capitalisation.

Thanks for the extra information, Mike.

tatewise wrote:I am not sure where the Surname Case Convert plugin came from, or went to, but there is Clean up Surname Capitalisation.

This is the one I have: But there's something a bit odd: when you download the Clean up Surname Capitalisation plugin, in spite of the name showing in the store, the file name is Surname Case Convert.fh_lua, and when installed it appears in the plugin list as Surname Case Convert. So I do have the one you referred to (the description is exactly the same, and I also ran a file comparison tool to check), it's just that it looks like it's called something else.

You are absolutely correct.
There are one or two Plugins in the Plugin Store like that, and need adjusting.
I will see what I can do.

Alternative name fields in the plugin store?

Actually, I see you've already mentioned this on the Plugins board, so thank you.