Family Historian User Group

There are two threads at the moment considering:

• Surname prefix (SPFX) -- more generally, handling structured names.
• Default Surnames on 'Add a child'

The context is making to develop "Wish List" items that Calico Pie the developers of Family Historian may take up with the result that FH is more international and those of us with mixed-culture family trees gain functionality.

The purpose of this thread is to look at the applicability of these issues to a Major Language group - and hopeful introduce a thread title which will specifically attract Spanish Speaking users and those who have got Spanish branches in their Family Trees.

My limited awareness is driven primarily by two main webpages:

• All you wanted to know and never dared to ask about Spanish family names - A personal page of Pablo Molinero Fernández at Stanford University
• Spanish naming customs - WIkipedia

From the above it would appear that naive non-Spanish Speaking genealogists can trip up over identifying basic name parts such as Given Name and Surnames and the use of prepositions and conjunctions.

The Stanford Page quotes as a (complex) Example:
Alejandro Rodríguez de la Peña y de Y barra

A Spanish Speaker would probably parse this for FH as:
Alejandro /Rodríguez de la Peña y de Y barra/

Where

• Alejandro is the sole Given Name but the single Given Name can be a compound one - such as José María
• Rodríguez de la Peña is the first part of the compound surname - being the first part of the father's surname
• y (approx translation - "and") is a conjunction much used until the 1960s, but since then often replaced with a dash or hyphen
• de Y barra is the second part of the compound surname - being the first part of the mother's surname

Wikipedia goes into some detail about the delightfully named "copulative conjunction y".

• The Ley de Registro Civil (Civil Registry Law) of 1870, requiring birth certificates indicating the paternal and maternal surnames conjoined with y.
• however, unlike in Catalan, the Spanish usage is infrequent.
• In the Philippines, y and its associated usages are retained only in formal state documents
• Moreover, when the maternal surname begins with an i vowel sound, written with either the vowel I (Ibarra), the vowel Y (Ybarra archaic spelling) or the combination Hi + consonant (Higueras), Spanish euphony substitutes e in place of y, thus the example of the Spanish statesman Eduardo Dato e Iradier (1856–1921).

In the context of the two threads above I can see a number of issues:

• How typical is this complexity?
• If the name is not being entered by "someone who knows" identifying the Given / Surname division is problematic. This looks like the major issue for naive genealogists giving rise to significant surname errors.
• If the Surname is correctly identified, Rodríguez de la Peña y de Y barra presumably sorts under "R", and if the Rodriguez was not there it would sort under "P" rather than "de la .." (with "de la" in the Surname Prefix (SPFX) and all the rest in the Surname (SURN))
• If we wanted to add a child for this man, the child's surname would Rodríguez de la Peña plus the first part of the mother's surname. If we wanted this to happen "automatically" there has to be a way to identify the first part of the surname. Cases might be:
  • Simple: Pablo /Ruiz Picasso/ - in a two word surname group it divides at the space. (To confuse this example Pablo chose to be "known as" Pablo Picasso)
  • Two word divided by a single conjunction or hyphen: Pablo Diego /Ruiz y Picasso/ (a fuller name of the same artist) - it divides before the conjunction - and the conjunction is included within the child's surname. In coding you might make "Ruiz y" the father's part to be directly combined with the mother's first surname - but that would fall foul of the rule about replacing y with e depending on the Maternal surname.

Does anyone have a feeling for how widely applicable a "Spanish Surname" option to the default surname for "Add a Child" would be, where the option was that the surname was built from three elements:

1. The first "part" of the father's surname identified by the copulative conjunction (y or e or -, or in simple cases a space other than one between a surname prefix and the associated surname)
2. The copulative conjunction (- or space) if that was what was used in the father's surname, otherwise y or e depending on the initial sound of the mother's surname.
3. The first "part" of the mother's surname identified by the copulative conjunction y (or e or -, or in simple cases a space other than one between a surname prefix and the associated surname)

For general knowledge (i.e. which we apply cerebrally rather than programmatically) are there any rules for recognising compound Given Names? How can a naive user identify Rodríguez in Alejandro Rodríguez de la Peña y de Y barra as part of the surname and not part of a compound Given Name? Looking at identified siblings may be one way.

are there any rules for recognising compound Given Names? How can a naive user identify Rodríguez in Alejandro Rodríguez de la Peña y de Y barra as part of the surname and not part of a compound Given Name? Looking at identified siblings may be one way.

I have enough problems with English names over this question, never mind Hispanic. One family (ostensibly) named "Jackson" used "Herbert" as a middle name. Eventually, probably deliberately, it became "Herbert Jackson" as an unhyphenated compound surname. But somewhere in the middle, there's a lot of mixed hinting about what the surname part was.

Then there's my own G-GM where I can't decide whether she's "Mary" or "Mary Jane".

So, aside from "get as much evidence as you can", I'm dubious if there are any decent rules. Of course, a form with a slot labelled "Surname" would help but it's surprising how few there are of those!

A long time ago when my old genealogy program went defunct (TMG) I played around a little with an open-source cross-platform solution called GRAMPS. And I really liked the program but it ultimately lacked so many of the features I want that I left it for FH. One of the things that struck me though is the amount of thought that went into seemingly simple topics like Names and Places. In fact if anyone has ever used GRAMPS you'll immediately noticed how much information can be contained in these two datasets. For example, here is a link to a discussion of Names in gramps: https://gramps-project.org/wiki/index.p ... _in_Gramps

Now I understand something like this is likely not possible in FH with the constraints imposed by GEDCOM but it illustrates just how complex an issue this is. I also have a lot of ancestors across international borders and names (and places) and the best practices for dealing with these within the constraints of the FH database is definitely of great interest to me as well.