Should I substiture "John" for "Johann?"

Question

I see researchers substituting John instead of Johann for German-sounding (first) names ...when records clearly say it is Johann. Is that an acceptable practice? Will Wikitree accept it as an alternate name? In other words, if one person uses Johann and the other uses John, will Wiki create two profiles? Thanks...

Answer 1

I don't think there's anyone up there policing this, but I'm pretty confident that the consensus of the members would be that you should go with the records.  If the records say Johann, then that's his name.  With that said, I know there are a lot of cases where immigrants to the U.S. anglicized their given names or surnames or both, so there may be records over a person's lifetime that use different names.  I have ancestors, for example, who were born as Johann or Georg or Wilhelm and died as John, George, or William.

It's your call as to how to best present the data in profiles you create, and you can use the nickname field, or free-form text in a Bio, to explain the usage of different given names.  But there shouldn't be two different profiles for the same person because of a name change in any case.

Comments

I agree with Dennis, except I would use the Preferred Name field not Other Nicknames in this case.

I did an experiment, using the main WikiTree Search for Johann Smith. It gave lots of results for John Smith. Similarly, search results for John Smith do include men called Johann. Provided the matching at profile creation time does the same conflation of John and Johann, there should be little danger of creating duplicates.

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Thank you. That's very reassuring.

Answer 2

There is no need to anglicize their names. If he was born as Johann and then migrated to America and went by John, I'd put John as an alternate name. But there is no need to make Johanns into Johns, or Tomases into Thomases, and so on.

Comments

If his birth info uses Johan, then his Proper First Name should be Johan.  If his later sources in United States used John 'consistently, then Preferred Name should be John (similar to Current Last Name, Preferred is last use of First Name).  Other Alternate spellings would be put into Other Nicknames.