Family Historian User Group

This has been touched on before, but what I'm really asking for now is not a quick fix to a particular report, but as the title says, a general consideration throughout FH of the effect of individuals in the tree changing their names. Presumably something for Version 5+.

The most common example is obviously married women. Taking the husband's surname is so common it ought to be considered the default, and any other case specified explicitly. But there are other examples. We have a few people on the tree who have changed their names (not just 'given name used') for a variety of reasons, some unknown to us. But recording an alternative name in FH does me no good at all apart from the ability (which I have done) to change the diagram to show alternative surnames in brackets.

Even if I recorded all their married names as alternative names (and I don't believe anybody would want to do that) it wouldn't help. Notably, the narrative reports are wrong. I am not the son of Ted Bowyer and Maureen Berks. I am the son of Ted Bowyer and his wife Maureen, nee Berks. Her name was Maureen Bowyer when I was born, and to imply anything else can be considered an insult. And I didn't marry Susan Lovett, I married Susan Nurse formerly Lovett (Nurse being her previous married name). When searching for censuses, or marriage and death records (isn't that the sort of thing genealogy is all about) I use the name at the time, not the name on the the birth register. FH has all the information necessary to make these deductions. But quite apart from the reporting issue, I cannot search for Maureen Bowyer in my tree, I cannot find her in the records list, I cannot select that name when attaching her picture, and so on. And regardless of the reason for the name change, I also can't find my wife's grandfather by the name he used when he joined the army in 1915, which is his children's surname and on his death registration, nor (quoting my great-grandfather's will) 'my nephew William Gladwell commonly known as Harry Bowyer' even though these are both correctly recorded in FH as alternative names, but don't appear anywhere in the FH user interface, unless I remember it's there already and click 'more' in the properties box.

For starters I would suggest the Individuals tab in the records window would be better considered as a names list, and show all the names (rather than all the individuals) on my tree. The same should be true where ever I have to select a name. And that the reports should at least mention alternative names where recorded, and use them where appropriate (as in 'son of...'). To be precise, all alternative names would have to have an associated range of dates, but except for married women (where the information is already available) the number of cases is small enough that it wouldn't matter much. There's no point in me trying to itemise all the other places where the name at the time would be more appropriate than the name at birth until the general principal is accepted, so I'll stop here. Suffice to say that it seems to me that an appropriate use of the name at the time would be a big unique tick for FH on CompareTheFamilyTreeProgram.com And yes, I accept that it would need some user options to control this behaviour in various places for those of you that want the original approach.


http://www.fhug.org.uk/wishlist/wldispl ... lwlref=363

ID:3995

Whole heartedly agree with you Chris. I too would prefer people with more than one name to be shown more than once in the appropriate place when sorted by name.

When sorted on anything other than name, then the duplicate entries would appear next to each other so I would suggest a fine tuning to not display the duplicate entries in these cases. But I haven't thought this through to know if this works or if the duplicates should stay.

Yes, a good idea.
My father was born an 'Enley' with no fathers name stated, but it seem took his fathers name from school age. Do I enter him as Enley or Yeates? This wish would help.
John

Here in Scotland married women stay in touch with their maiden names: my grandmother Christina Johnstone, for instance, would have been known as Mrs Taylor once she got married but on her gravestone she's called Johnstone again. Which people searching Scottish MIs may not know!

Also, 'Major' was a popular first name in another section of my family in the C19. At least one of them changed it (to George) - no doubt the military assumptions became embarrassing. He was a baker.

Jocelyn

JonAxtell said:
I too would prefer people with more than one name to be shown more than once in the appropriate place when sorted by name.

I can see this leading to a huge amount of confusion. If this option is seriously being considered then there must be a way to turn it off for those of us that don't need it.

Gerry

I agree with Gerry, above, that to display an Individual's record multiple times in the Records window just because they are known by different names in different contexts or at different times is likely to be too confusing for most users.  For instance my father Kenneth James Richmond was always known as 'Jim' within the family but as 'Ken' in the army and at work.  How would FH know whether to show his record once, or five times? (It would be six or more, but he was never known as 'Ken Jim', etc.) I know of some married women who revert to their maiden name after divorce and so re-marry using that name rather than their former husband's surname (and in some cases never use their new husband's surname for any purpose); and other women who continue to use their former husband's surname for some purposes even after they have remarried, and who revert to that name for all purposes after the death of their second husband. The possibilities are almost endless.

As has been mentioned elsewhere, it is very easy to add additional columns to the Records window (and to reduce column width if short of space) to allow display of, and/or sorting by, alternative names or e.g. surname of spouse, etc.  And if Name Variants are formally recorded using a Custom Attribute in FH, a Fact Query can easily repeat the Individual's formal name for each name variant.

The FH report generator would probably need psychic powers to guarantee using the 'correct' preferred version of everyone's name in each context, and may even need to take account of how the reader of the report knew the individual! [eek]

When I said with more than one name I meant more than one NAME entry. I didn't mean married names, nor nicknames or given names. If a user creates events to record a name change then multiple lines for each individual wouldn't appear as it's an event not a name. If they created multiple names for an individual, then multiple lines would appear. I agree that it might need to be turn-off-able. I would prefer multiple lines to extra columns which would be blank for a majority of entries. It also would allow use of the Find entry field in the record window.

Wow... At least I provoked some discussion.

Yes of course, anything like this should be switch-off-able.

In terms of features, what I'm looking for is (for example):

1) The ability to find and identify (in all contexts where I need to select an individual by name) married women by their married names, without explicitly recording an alternative name, and any other people with explicit alternative names (and without resorting to queries, which are too techy for most users, and too clumsy to use in most contexts).

2) Narrative reports to include at least something like 'John Smith, also known as Fred Bloggs' where there is an explicit alternative name recorded.

3) Narrative reports to use name at the time where appropriate (and of course, where practical). 'Boy Surname son of Dad Surname and Mum nee MaidenName' is not hard to do from the information available, and covers the vast majority of cases. 'He married Mum PreviousMarriedName nee MaidenName' is not impossible either. More complex cases may need defining explicitly (as we currently do with custom sentences for other events).

Whether this is achieved in part by having a 'names' list instead of (or as well as) an 'individuals' list in the records window is a matter of design. What is needed is a general review of how the effect of an individual's change of name should be represented in the user interface.

On second thoughts, I should have seperated 1) into 1a) and 1b) since one is (arguably) a design omission, and the other clearly more controversial...

1a) The ability to find and identify (in all contexts where I need to select an individual by name) people with explicit alternative names by that name.

1b) The ability to find and identify (in all contexts where I need to select an individual by name) married women by their married names, without explicitly recording an alternative name.

Hi Chris,

Unfortunately the identification of name changes will require a query of some sort to achieve anything like the detail that you have highlighted. Whether this is achieved by the programmer (Simon) and embedded within the program or is written & supplied as an add on is another matter.

However, may I add an additional detail to your latest suggestions (due to several examples within my own family tree) ->

1b) The ability to find and identify (in all contexts where I need to select an individual by name) men who change their name at the time of marriage either by taking their partners' name or hyphenating both names, without explicitly recording an alternative name.


Bilko

Just wanted to toss this out to see what people had to say about it....

I noticed that one could put multiple first names into the search box at Ancestry, and wondered what would happen if you did a similar search with both a woman's maiden name and married surname in the surname box. Interesting results happened -- try it sometime and see what you get.

Perhaps it would be easier to find women in Family Historian's record view if we could have one main entry that follows the style that newspapers use -- list all the woman's surnames in order of acquisition.

Jan

jmurphy said:
Perhaps it would be easier to find women in Family Historian's record view if we could have one main entry that follows the style that newspapers use -- list all the woman's surnames in order of acquisition.
Jan

It's normal in most documents to have them the other way round, e.g. The widow Smith formerly Jones nee Brown

I thought the practise of listing a women's previous surnames in order was just limited to the east cost of America.

Personally I'd prefer to be able to see a list of names in the Individual Records window where the first name for a person shows a full record and the other names - call them aliases if you like - are clearly distinguished as being aliases. (I did think it would be possible to only show part of the record and click to get to the full one but that makes it slow to see the useful stuff I have in my Individual Records window.)

While I can see the justification for auto-creation of a married woman's name, the fact is there are several schemes - the Americans concatenate surnames (it can't be just the East Coast Jon, the 1st one I remember hearing was Alexis Carrington Colby, if I dare admit to watching that program - too young to know any sense); the Scots don't change it at all in many circumstances. And I'm sure there are other schemes in other countries that I don't know of. Nor would the country of the marriage necessarily determine the scheme. Perhaps there should be a flag - autogenerate-English OR autogenerate-American OR... Just one auto-scheme for simplicity. Then, if set, any marriage would generate according to the auto-scheme. Except, you'd also want to be able to individually stop the auto and create a married name manually according to your reqts.
In addition, it should be possible to create manually(only?) other alias names to cover the other circumstances and these aliases would appear in wherever seems sensible. I would doubt it can be handled automatically. You personally might want all alternate names to appear as aliases providing you've set a program-level-option. But I don't think I would because alternate names entered for spelling purposes aren't the same in my view and shouldn't count as aliases. (At least - that's what I think now!). I wouldn't want to have alternate / alias names constrained by date either: James Griffiths called himself James Maddocks sometimes and Griffiths other times - it wasn't one then the other.

Food for thought...

The topic of variant surnames came up on the Rootsweb list for FH users, and someone suggested adding a column for the Soundex code (they then went on to discuss the weaknesses and quirks of Soundex).

That got me thinking -- in my book database at home, and in our inventory at work, we often have cases where the same individual has more than one name -- the authors who write under pseudonyms / pen names. How do we teach the databases that Louise Marley and Toby Bishop are the same person? We create a sort code that results in the books written as Bishop sorting together with the work written as by Marley.

If FH allowed this kind of custom ID / sort code, one could have variants of the form BATE / BATES (as discussed on the list), and the ancestors /descendants of Chris' case 'John Smith, also known as Fred Bloggs' act as if they were the same surname, and they could be viewed next to each other in the Records Window.

Another database I use (this one for music) has a function which allows you to specify all the members in a band lineup, and it has a table where one can define the years a particular individual was in the band. If we had a similar reference table for names and the dates in which particular forms of the names could be found, this would address the problem Chris brought up of the form of a woman's name at a particular date, for narrative reports.

The problems are not insurmountable -- unless of course one does not wish to deviate from a standard such as GEDCOM. (The music database I use has a similar problem because the developer doesn't want to drift too far away from the data structures of Gracenote/cddb, with which the program interacts.)

As for the concatenation of surnames -- I wouldn't say it is common in everyday usage, but when it is used (generally for wedding announcements or death notices) it is understood what is meant -- e.g. Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. In obituaries, the maiden name will sometimes be included in parentheses e.g. Jacqueline (Bouvier) Kennedy Onassis.

I don't necssaarily think the program should auto-generate this form, but it could recognize it if entered. It would be useful to be able to record the actual names used in something more than notes.

Jan

As you say Jan, the problems are not insurmountable. There really is no issue with the GedCom standard... The information needed for most cases is already there... It may need the odd custom extension to record exceptions or text templates, but that's not new to FH.

My point really is that, where there is an alternative name recorded (or indeed deduced from other information such as a marriage), FH should at least report it where appropriate, and allow me to use it in the numerous places in the user interface where I have to select an individual by name. Any solution involving queries or extra columns doesn't do that.

How can I select to see alternative names in the Individual Records list or a report or somewhere...I can't find the field reference.

Eventually found it...its an array so 2 for the second and <99 selects the last.

For example:

INDI.NAME[<99]:SURNAME_FIRST

Shows the last alternate name and blank if there is only 1.