Naming Conventions for the Geni User

Floyd Bliss Hanson, Prof. - You can customize how you view names on the world tree on the bottom right of the screen when in tree view (http://www.geni.com/family-tree). Different countries and times in history have different methods for the adoption of surnames, etc. Typically it is best to defer to the country and time period in question.

Thanks, but I have had customized my viewing of names for quite a while, but the feature is limited.

Since it concerns the World Tree, I don't think that your proposal, particularly for divorced women, is used in large parts of the world.
Why distinguish between a (divorced) woman and a (divorced) man?

Floyd Bliss Hanson, Prof. the standard in genealogy is to use the earliest name you can find sources for. Usually that is the name at birth/baptism (for those that baptize their children just a few days/months after birth). If it isn't possible to find a name at birth, we use the earliest we have sources for. Names used after marriage(s) are secondary to the name at birth, and therefore is added to the Alternate Namefields in most genealogical software. But since Geni is at the moment lacking in the use of namefields, we usually use Also Known As to show alternate names.

There is a difference between how names are written in genealogy, and how names were used in real life/legally. In genealogy we use the earliest name, in real life we use legal name, which is the name at the event.

Ofcourse we also write down the exact writing/wording/spelling we find in the sources we use, which includes how the name was written in that source, at that event, at that specific moment in time. On Geni we use either notes under the sources tab or the About me tab for this information.

Geni allows for the surname at birth, a married surname, and then alternate names or spellings of names, for example is misspelled in a record somewhere, in the Also Known As field.

If a female had mutliple marriages and uses the last name of her most current partner, one might choose to put previous surnames used in the AKA field. As far as I know, that seems ot be the best want to handle it that allows the search logarithm to find people with multiple names.

It would be nice if Geni made names time-line depended.
That would open up the possibility to register different names depending on events (like marriage, immigration and name change in the new country, or something like a name change after a pilgrimage to Mekka).

I would love that, Job. Names should be associated with sourced events, not just scattered around from miscellaneous sources.

In my family, we use the method of chronological concatenative accretion. This is because many European Jews changed (or were forced to change, or were forced to acquire) their surnames for reasons other than marriage. Geni allows for lengthy display names; the extended format is used by me on the display name only. Without contcatentaive assemblage, key people in my family tree "disappear or are confused with their similarly-named descendants. I am only applying this standard to my own family, and i will continue to do so, both for males and females.

To be clear, what i mean by "disappear" is this found in the case of my ancestress Karoline Gella Tuchmann Mandelbaum Hopf: lacking any part of that name, you will confuse her with another Karoline or you will not find her at all. The first two names are her two first names -- not a first name and a nickname, not a first name and a middle name -- her actual two FIRST names, which date from two differrent eras in her life. The first surname is her birth surname. The second surname is her married surname. The third surame is her married surname after it was legally changed at a time when Jews were allowed to take on trade-names for use in commerce. It is not the result of a divorce. These names are the story of her life. She is not Karoline (Tuchmann) Hopf, nor is she Gella (Mandelbaum) Hopf. I see nothing wrong -- and EVERYTHING right, in giving her name in chronological order, as changed by law several times: Karoline Gella Tuchmann Mandebaum Hopf.

I think the bottom line is names can be quite confusing LOL.

Justin Durand and Job Waterreus Wouldn't it get confusing if the names changed according to time and require that every profile have events created?

It is true that we deal within a limited number of fields.

Wendi -

For the USA I tree I use the same method you do

- First name
- Middle name (if any, otherwise blank)
- Last name (at event death, and using the Chicago Manual of Style, which suggests that biographical print styling is alphabetically by "last last name.")
- Birth surname (applies to both men and women)
- All other names in AKA including nickname

I try to use the display name sparingly, but admire the creative solution Catherine posted.

Catherine,

We aren't suggesting that the primary name on the profile be changed, but that there be a list of documented names attached to events.

Almost every woman in North America and western Europe who married more than once had a different surname at each marriage. The current Geni system, which combines birth names and married names, makes a muddle of it. You have to focus on the fact that it was this particular person, name to be guessed, who was a party to the party.

If the greatest genealogical crime is making up data, this has to be near the top (in my opinion).

The solution you suggest, using your ancestor, is very clever but also deeply offensive to some women. They feel that it distorts their real experience and the experience of their ancestors. I know because I tried doing that way for a while years ago ;)

Private User,

People get born, so that's an event that should be present for all profiles. For most profiles the name at birth will be known. If that name does not change and there are no sources at other points in the live of that person that state other names it would not be necessary to register any other names.

But there are also a lot of profiles where things are different. It could be that names at birth are different for those in other sources and those other sources are from different times in the life of that person.
For those profiles we must now use methods for registration that make it more difficult to recognise the profile may be present on Geni already (thereby creating multiple profiles for the same person)

Having the possibility to have different names at different events will make it easier to find women who married multiple times, because a lot of users do not register the name a birth for a profile when they are starting to use Geni and will change the name field for living persons when they remarry.
A marriage is an event. Making it possible to register a different name on a certain point on the time-line could accommodate this without creating the confusing we have now.

Names are really confusing sometimes since so many have been changed or spelled different by people. A lot of people that immigrated and couldn't speak English was put down as whatever the sensor thought it should be and through the years they ( generations) don't really know the real name and spelling of their ancestors.

Job Waterreus,

I have to disagree with your comments on having a given name at birth. Some like one of my father's first cousins is known to the family as Isaac or Ike, but his birth registration reads Baby boy Siskind.

Job Waterreus

I fear you make using Geni as a genealogical platform to complicated for beginning users and users nog working on a regular scheme with you ideas about different names at different time-scales. So I do not agree with your proposals. Geni is not yet easy at all for general internet-visitors, so let's stay realistic about what is to be extended and what not.

Job Waterreus I understand the concept, I'm just not clear how it would work effectively within the platform without making things more complicated. I'm totally open to all ideas. I'm just having trouble conceptualizing this one.

Do you envision the "events" being created automatically? When i first started with Geni, I tried using the "events" feature for things like immigration to the US etc, but found it a bit tedious and for my benefit only as most of my non-Geni using family really didn't take notice of the additional tabs on profiles.

I guess my point is that I'm open to the idea, but curious as to how you see it being put in place :)

Private User - I agree it may be confusing, but perhaps Job Waterreus has some ideas about how it would work in a way that's not as complicated as we think.

I don't quite understand the argument about it being too complicated. What am I missing?

It has been the "genealogical" standard for many generations to use the "birth name" as the reference name. Everyone understood that there had to be exceptions. "Baby coy Siskind" can be "Isaac Siskind" without too much drama. And, traditionally we said "Henry VII, King of England" rather than "Henry Tudor" and "Henry VIII, King of England" rather than "Prince Henry of England". On Geni we've drifted away a bit, but that's still the basic idea.

The only difference here is that instead of putting all the AKAs in one long string without sources, we would put them in the events we got them from, and be able to see a chronological list of names like the list of events.

How does it make things too complicated to do it the way we've always done it?

Hey guys - please remember the KISS

Sorry - it cut off early. I was trying to say - please remember the KISS PRINCIPLE !!!!

I hope the explaining that Justin did does help. I feel like him that it would not complicate things, but would make it possible to solve some problems with the way things are handled now.

Having a possibility does not mean everybody would HAVE to use it. So for those people who do not want to use the extra possibilities nothing changes.

There are some problems with the way we register the use of different names in different sources at the moment. For example the sources for birth registration, marriage and burial all can have spelling variations and there could be sources for other events as well that use still different variations. It is not always so simple to put all the possible variations in the aka field. This gets even more difficult as there are more sources (like for historical figures). So mostly then the about me is used as well.
This will make it harder for the Geni match algorithm (and for Geni users as well) to find all possible duplicates.

The other problem is that names do change sometimes. This can happen when someone migrates to a new country, but also with other events like crowing or going to live in a convent. The way a lot of user register the last-names of women, a name change could happen on marriage as well. This makes it even harder to spot multiple profiles or to recognise a profile (because a source can use a completely different last-name).

To make it not too difficult I think giving the possibility to add additional names for a baptise registration (could be used when different from those that where registered for birth) and marriage (to add the name of the current husband without losing the name at birth or the name of a previous husband) would help research a lot.

Having the possibility to also add names for events on the time-line would help even more for the special cases, where there are other events when a name change may occur.

I hope this helps a bit.
If others feel they can explain better please do!

There are a lot of ways this could be done.

May be this helps to give an idea about how it could look for adding additional names for events like baptism and marriage: http://www.geni.com/photo/view/6000000012557914819?photo_id=6000000...

Choosing the option would present additional name fields.
But it could be done in other ways (like adding a push button [as there is now for adding another language] instead of a check mark).

In the time-line there could be a check mark indicating additional/changed names: http://www.geni.com/photo/view?photo_id=6000000032466949137
Those names could then be seen by clicking the event link.