Name Confusion and Catholic Confirmation Names
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?
Chris, as you know, I’m not Catholic either so I’m not real sure how it’s supposed to work. Apparently, the French or the Canadian-French or maybe all Catholics used the confirmation name before the first name many years ago. It’s my understanding that that is not the case anymore. I think now it comes after the first name, but before the middle name.
My husband says to drop the confirmation name completely - but there are several reasons why I won’t do that. First, it is part of that persons record - so little information is available already that I cannot stomach losing any more. Another reason is that sometimes that is the only name I find for that person. And what if someone finds Wikitree and only has the name Joseph Pitre. If I dropped that part of the name, someone may miss finding him on a search here. Last of all, I cannot always be completely sure that it is truly a confirmation name. Some people actually name their children Joseph and Marie (Mary). My mother’s parents were such a case, Mary Ellen and Joseph Frank.
I’d use the nicknames field, but that will put the name out of order, won’t it? And - since everyone’s first name was Marie and Joseph, they often have nicknames to distinguish one from another. The Prefix field is looking more and more attractive to me. I never use it for anything else and it would put the confirmation name in the correct space (first), but that messes up searches, right? I’m stuck. Adding a field specifically for this will just crowd things too.
For now, I’ll continue putting all the names in the First Name field. By the way, when I’m doing that, under my breath I’m saying, “Chris’ll just have to make his search engine recognize MY formatting…..”.
Back to reality, I think you’re doing a wonderful job and I appreciate your prompt responses and the many changes that you have made. If I could get my Congresswoman to do half that much, life would be grand.
Comment by Joanna Tolson — September 10, 2009 @ 7:15 pm
Chris,
I’m not sure if this is something you want to or can consider, but what about an Advanced Options feature for people who want to add say, several alternate name spellings, color coding of text, or whatever else? I can’t think of some of them now because it’s 5 a.m.. That way you can keep the basic settings for new users who are still feeling their way around the site and allow more options for people who want to expand certain kinds of information.
Comment by Joanna Tolson — September 11, 2009 @ 5:29 am