I have recently become aware of an "oddity" in several Profiles needing clarification

+6 votes
398 views
I have recently become aware of an "oddity" or what I consider an "oddity" in several profiles that I'm hoping one or more of you experienced WikiTreers can explain or clarify for me.  The situation is this: On many, many profiles the LNAB is given, but there is no father or mother identified.  Now how can you know what the LNAB is when you don't know who the father is?

I mean no criticism of anyone and I'm not suggesting anyone did anything wrong.  I just feel there is a logical explanation that is sailing over my head.

I'm embarrassed to say that I printed off a large stack of such profiles, but now that I need them I can't find them!  But I can, at least, provide you with the profile IDs of the profiles I came across today.

I would very much appreciate if you would enlighten me as to how a profile can have an LNAB when neither the father nor the mother is known.

Walker-12288

Cannon-32

Cannon-2203

Cannon-2204

Goodman-3092
in Policy and Style by Judy Wardlow G2G6 Mach 2 (21.1k points)
You forgot one

Hoffman-3210

:D
I want to thank each and every person who responded to my question.  All of you made very good points and some even provided answers that would never have occurred to me.  That is one of the great strengths of G2G.  We get answers/opinions of a large group of very diverse individuals.  It is also a GREAT place to broaden our WikiTree knowledge/skills.

So again I thank you one and all for educating me and helping me to understand how this situation could occur..

7 Answers

+6 votes
It seems to me that knowing who the parents are is rarely required to know what the LNAB is. It would vary by culture and time, but in my experience doing Canadian/English/French genealogy, if you see a man or a single woman in a census or something like that, you can be pretty sure that the last name they're using is the one they were born with.

Also, even after a person changes their last name, there are still some records that will show the original. Eg. a child's birth record or marriage record will often show the mother's maiden name.
by Liander Lavoie G2G6 Pilot (451k points)
+8 votes
Hello Judy,

I am not sure if this covers all LNAB with no father, but LNAB can be given on the birth cert  (or record) of a child (when it lists mother's name it is often not the surname of the child).  It can be on a death cert, or on a marriage record, when no father is mentioned.  Many of those old records give clues to LNAB without telling who the father was.  It might even appear in the census, or be guessed (I hate that) from middle names given to children over several generations (as found in my husband's line).  Lots of ways to get LNAB, I think.  Except, of course, those ways are not certain, but many are really good clues.
by Kristina Adams G2G6 Pilot (343k points)
Even when the father's name is known, a profile for him may not have been created here.  If his profile is not here then he will not be listed in the data as the father.
+5 votes
While I agree that in a perfect world we would have records going back to the creation of earth, that is not possible and for that reason we must make a reasonable decision based on the facts we know.  We all run into brick walls somewhere in one or more of our lines and when that happens I choose the earliest record I can fine and use the names from that.  They may not be exactly correct but they are the best available information and for that reason I base any decision on them.
by Dale Byers G2G Astronaut (1.7m points)
+7 votes
If I enter a spouse to somebody I am working on I often do not pursue this non-related line. There is only so much time in the day and I prefer to spend it on the subjects of my immediate interest. Maybe someday when all my immediate family is entered and I can't find anything else to do I can go back to some of those lines and work on them. In the meantime they are there for others interested in these families to connect to.
by Helmut Jungschaffer G2G6 Pilot (595k points)
+7 votes
Two points:

1) (and Helmut and Gaile allude to this) Some of us still don't have mature, fully developed trees. When you're in that boat, and you're researching an ancestral line, you will eventually get to a point where you consciously decide not to create that next profile, or add that next name to the data base, even though you may know it. That happens when you find yourself drifting so far away from your mainline tree that you would rather spend the available time on your more direct ancestors.

2) The U.S. is relatively young, and many people are able to work their ancestral lines back to the old country. For European immigrants from, say, late 1600s to mid-1700s, it is not unusual to find cases where the spelling and/or pronunciation of a surname changed in the new world, sometimes in multiple ways for different branches of the same family. So there are situations, when you're tracking back from an anglicized surname, in which you may not be able to verify the correct LNAB of a parent.
by Dennis Barton G2G6 Pilot (549k points)
+1 vote
As I understand, WikiTree uses the term "Last Name at Birth" as an generic term to include women's maiden names; the original last names of other people who acquired new last names due to emigration, adoption, or some other reason; and the last names of people who used the same last name for their whole lives.

We could think of it as "person's primary last name." It doesn't necessarily mean "the name as recorded on a government-certified birth certificate."
by Ellen Smith G2G Astronaut (1.5m points)
+4 votes

Hi Judy, not to beat a dead horse as there are plenty of great answers already but really it boils down to the fact that sometimes we have to make inferences from indirect evidence.

In some (many?) societies it is unusual for a man to change his name so for individuals in those societies we infer that the last name on a later record was his name at birth. Similarly, in some cultures a woman adopts the surname of her husband so when a record gives a different surname we infer that it is her 'maiden' name. These inferences can certainly be erroneous: aside from variations in spelling over time and name changes due to immigration (or even simply moving farms in the case of farm names), people sometimes simply 'reinvented' themselves under aliases - to escape past crimes, to avoid discrimination, to make life easier in a new culture, or 'just because'. A different surname on a record for a wife could in some cases be a prior married name we are unaware of and not her last name at birth, or we might believe a women's last name at birth is unknown when in fact it just happened to be the same as her husband's.

We take the facts we are dealt, consider the conventions of the society and family they were part of, as well as the known details of their lives, and we make our best inferences - and when we find evidence that our inferences were wrong we correct them. This is why it is so important that we detail where our information came from. Moreover when the inferences are "non-obvious" it is best to explain them. (For example a profile might say something like: "The spelling of the surname Burritt is unknown prior to the families arrival in North America. A number of researchers have suggested that prior to arrival in North America the family name was Barette or some variation thereof. <Footnotes> While there is no definitive proof of this fact, the arguments made by these researchers is considered persuasive and this earlier spelling has been adopted as the last name at birth to promote further study.)

by Rob Ton G2G6 Pilot (288k points)

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