WikiTree Community Blog

Top WikiTreer Joanna and I have been talking about the issue of what to do with Catholic confirmation names on WikiTree.

She has this whole line of French ancestors deep in her family tree named Joseph and Marie. This has caused her great consternation when it comes to navigating between them. How do you know, at a glance, which family member is which? Is it Joseph the grandfather, or Joseph the father, or Joseph the son, or Joseph the grandson, etc., etc.?

I just looked at her Watchlist. She has 154 men named Joseph Pitre in there. Uh … I didn’t even realize how was this bad was for her until just now. I’m sorry, Jo.

Because of some recent improvements, mostly suggested by Joanna, it is getting easier to tell one Joseph from another. When you’re on a family tree page you can see full middle names, birth dates, and death dates. However, in searches and automatic matches you can still only see middle initials and birth and death decades.

The difference in name presentation is because of privacy issues. You can only view a particular person’s family tree page when you have Trusted List access to them, but anybody can do a search. Therefore, we can list full info on a family tree but not in search results. At some point we will make searches sophisticated enough to know whether the user doing the search is in a particular person’s Trusted List or not, or if that particular person is unrestricted, but for now that’s not possible.

On profile pages, when you have Trusted List access, of course, you can see a person’s full information. But even here on profiles, it’s not clear how confirmation names should be entered and presented.

How should confirmation names be entered and used so that it’s easy for a person like Joanna to preserve this important information yet still tell people apart?

An obvious solution would be to add new Confirmation Name fields and display them everywhere we display a name. But as Joanna knows I’m hesitant to do this. We already have eight fields for names:

Prefix
Proper First Name (i.e. full, formal first name)
Preferred Name (i.e. colloquial version of first name)
Other Nicknames
Middle Name
Last Name at Birth
Current Last Name (or last name at death)
Suffix

Moreover, we’re considering adding a third last name field. Joanna and others have pointed out that last names often have alternate spellings, especially as you go back in history. This field could also be used when women married more than once and therefore had more than one married name.

The disadvantage of adding new fields is complexity. The more complexity you add for advanced users the more difficult or daunting the site becomes for newbies. It’s very important to me that WikiTree be accessible to new and casual users, since most of us want our family members to view the site and participate even if they don’t want to devote a lot of time and energy to family history.

An idea I had this morning is for confirmation names to be put in the Nicknames field. When we added that third first name field I meant it to be for any kind of alternate name, so I think this would fit. Perhaps we could rename the field to make it more inclusive.

I’m not a Catholic and I don’t have experience with how confirmation names are used. In modern American usage, I think, they’re usually put after a middle name, right? How about in genealogical and historical records?

Thoughts? Does anybody know how other family tree sites and software packages organize confirmation names?

WikiTreers,

Many of you have suggested adding more name fields. In particular, we needed fields for Prefix (e.g. Dr., Sgt.) and Suffix (e.g., Jr., III). These have now been added.

We’ve also added a field for Nicknames. This way nicknames can be distinct from the Preferred First Name (e.g., my brother is Theodore; more commonly known as Ted, nicknamed T.D. when young).

Thanks, especially, to my brother, to Omar Wasow, and Lester K. Jr. for suggesting these additional name fields.

Another change this week: a half-dozen optional fields such as birthdate and deathdate can now be entered when you create a person. The way we’d initially set things up you could only add the First Name and Last Name at Birth when you create a person. Everything else can be added and edited later. Somehow I thought this would be easier.

Beta tester Karen W. convinced me that additional fields are a big convenience when you’re adding a number of people at once, e.g. more than one sibling or child. Thanks, Karen.

One more change of note: we made inputting dates easier. Peter H. pointed out that our system accepted the US date format, e.g. “September 26, 2008″, but rejected (”the more rational”!) UK/EU format, e.g. “26 September 2008″. Both are now accepted. Other acceptable inputs: “26 Sept. 2008″, “Sep 26, 2008″, etc.

Onward and upward,

Chris