What is LNAB, really? (Request for help text change)

Question

We're having quite a row about a clarified Puritan Great Migration policy for last name at birth. In the midst of it, it was pointed out that the current instructions for the Last Name At Birth field contain what in my mind are contradictory instructions. (I was also very surprised to see this language.) What's in Blue contradicts what is in Red.

 From the style guide: CORRECTION: Help Text

UWhen conventions changed during a person's lifetime

It's not uncommon for a person's name to change. This is especially common with immigrants. The Proper First Name and Last Name at Birth fields should be the names they were born with, in their native language. The Preferred First Name and Current Last Name should be the names they used at the end of their life.

It's also common in cases of earlier ancestors that the spelling of a name was not standardized and that the person him or herself would have used more than one. In those cases, we recommend choosing the spelling that is most recognizable to modern descendants, e.g. "Winslow" rather than "Wynslow" or "Winslowe."

I think that what is in red gets into very dangerous territory and that what is in blue should be the bottom line wherever possible. In the PGM project (and pretty much every where else on wikitree-- except perhaps the New Netherland and EuroAristo naming conventions) we've been defining "names they were born with" as what is found on a birth or baptism record.

As we're seeing in many PGM profiles, there is often lack of agreement about "choosing the spelling that is most recognizable to modern descendants."

If we stick with the true meaning of "Last Name At Birth," then we have a consistent standard to fall back upon. 

I therefore request support of the community that the leaders of Wikitree remove the text in red, above, (and that entire paragraph actually) from the instructions for the Name Fields.

Thanks for considering this request.

Answer 1

Spelling fixation is a very modern fad.  Before the 20th century people would have been very clear that the name was the same irrespective of how anybody spelt it.

Comments

I concur, RJ. Another reason to default to what's on the record.

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Just to complicate it ;-) 

In the Swedish church books the priest sometime used the Latin form of the name....and also used abbreviations

Article in Swedish about all the different forms of names you can find

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Interesting!

Answer 2

Sorry Jillaine but deciding on a LNAB for EuroAristo in medieval times or earlier doesn't fit with what is in blue.  Names in original sources are in Latin and almost invariably are spelled differently in each document, sometimes even in the same document there can be differences. Also there is often no birth or baptism information, the first mention might be as an adult.

Using a modern spelling is often the only way to reach some consensus about how to name anyone from medieval times.

I also have a Cornish family, Carveth where I have come across at least 12 different ways of spelling their surname. Baptism details for children in the same family could all be a different variation, so using their baptismal surname would seem to be detrimental to any consistency on Wikitree.

Comments

The blue text doesn't say anything about spelling.  Basically it says if a man marries an heiress and takes her name, that's not his LNAB.

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"Baptism details for children in the same family could all be a different variation,"

Jillaine would have you give a different LNAB to every child with her interpretation of LNAB.

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See my response below about the relationship between sources and LNAB which also explains my reasoning further.

Re EuroAristo-- as I mentioned in my original post-- some projects have developed exceptions to the last name at birth instructions. That's their perogative-- although I don't think all agree on that concept (that projects can override systemwide rules).

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Joe, yes. In my own family -- way back -- one child's baptism used one spelling; its later sibling's record used another.  I have no problem with that because my use of the fields has been to record what the records say. I am now understanding that this is the root of our differences.

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John. ? Why would you not use the Latin spelling on a 'rare' baptismal register for the Last name at birth? Preferred name could be whatever modern designation you think a name will be found under, and the other last name fields have plenty of room for adding alternate spellings in later documents and/or secondary sources.

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Side note on "projects can override systemwide rules": this is note true.

Project style rules should be elaborations on the general guidelines. When it becomes clear that project rules contradict general rules we have to work it out. Like we're doing here.

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Sorry Anne if I gave you the wrong idea, but there are no rare baptismal registers for the group of people I am talking about in Latin or any other language.  For most of them the only mention is when their name is on a charter or other legal document somewhere which means they are an adult.  If we're lucky perhaps one of the chronicles mentions a year they were born or some other age and date association that can give us an approximate year.

There are 2 problems with using Latin names that I can see - one as has been mentioned there is no consistency in how any of the names were spelled.  There were no dictionaries, the scribe wrote the name as he thought it should be written, and if it was a long document, then he might spell the name totally differently when he had to mention that person again.  The next monk or the monk in the neighbouring monastery would spell the name totally differently again.  So there is huge problem in choosing which name to actually use for the profile.

Secondly Latin was the language of the Church at that time, and perhaps because it was mostly monks who could write, it became the language used on official documents throughout most of early and medieval Europe.  However we have very few documents in vernacular languages which means we don't know what they might have called themselves in their 'native language' .

I think the best option for early EuroAristo is to continue to use the name in there native language as we have been doing eg William for English nobility, Wilhelm for German nobility, Guillaume for French.etc and then if we know or can find a document in Latin then use that in some way in the biography.

Answer 3

I am in favor of removing that confusing red paragraph or perhaps clarifying it's usage.

As I look at it in context. "When conventions change during a persons lifetime." I don't think this is meant to give us 'wiggle room' with LNAB. I think it's meant to give us options with the Current Last Name and Preferred First Name.

To clarify it, simply add at the end of the sentence... for use in Preferred First name and Current Last Name fields.

Comments

I would be happy with that clarification.

Answer 4

I wish to clarify the argument since I am the one who has been disagreeing with Jillaine in the other thread.  Since this is part of the PGM project, we are talking about 17th century records.  Jillaine is saying that LNAB is the same thing as “first spelling used,” especially as found in a baptismal record.  So that no matter what the spelling of the parent’s LNAB, the child’s profile should be written however it is spelled in the baptismal record (after all it is “At Birth”).  So, if Henry Bachelor had son a recorded as Batchler, and another Batcheller, and another Bachlar, and another Batcheldar every single person in the family should have a different LNAB.

To me this makes absolutely no sense.  Spelling was completely non-standardized pre-1700, and so you can’t say that the spelling found in a church register in 1620 is the absolute correct one.  It would be confusing, and near impossible to research a family if the LNAB wasn’t somehow standardized. 

The current guidelines state:

http://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Name_Fields

LNAB: This field could also be called Proper Last Name, Surname, or Maiden Name.

I don’t find the blue and the red sections highlighted in Jillaine’s post be contradictory at all, because I don’t think LNAB refers to spelling.  To me, LNAB means the Name of the Family They Were Born Into, not ‘spelling found in a parish record.’

To focus on earliest spelling with no regard to the history of the family, to what the family is commonly known as to descendants, to published histories on the family, or to research articles on the family will only lead to confusion.  The guidelines should remain as they are and if anything be clarified so that it is clear that LNAB does not always equal ‘baptismal spelling,’ especially in pre-1700 profiles.

Comments

Once again Joe - I personally sympathize with your case as you know because I have many of the same sentiments. But what we really can't have is multiple ways to identify LNAB because in the PGM and Mayflower projects we have four or five different profiles for each person right now due to GEDCOM imports. They all need to be merged but for each merge all the profile admins dig in their heals because they each want some different personally preferred spelling. We are not getting the mergers done that need to get done because of this. So PGM and the Mayflower projects are not moving along. So we need one set of very specific rules the determine last name at birth. And if that means Gov William Bradfourth of the Mayflower then I'm in.

I think Chris stated in response to several queries what he means is the name of the birth record. But if you have five kids and one has a different spelling you can name that one kid the same as the other four because that was obviously and error and the documents for the other four kids were around the time of the birth of the child. But he is not saying you can manufacture the last name at birth from a marriage record or death record if you have a perfectly good baptism record. And you can't just pick the standardized name from some genealogy book. We are going to use the best estimate of their last name at birth based on documents from around the time of that birth not from around the time of death, etc. I don't want to be a spelling Nazi. But if I need to merge five copies of William Bradfourth I want to point to the rules and say rename and merge these puppies! I already had two renaming issues come up today where we can't come to a consensus on what to rename the profiles so we can't merge them. So we're stuck with islands of despair.

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There's a general problem with people blocking merges of undisputed duplicates.  But in your case, policy provides the answer - management by project.  PPP the final ID (project's choice) and appoint a project member as a PM.

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Roland, I think this is a typo, but just to make sure: "No other records will override the baptism or birth records" should be removed from the flowchart.

Other records could override birth records. For example, the marriage record for the parents could override the spelling on the birth record for the child if the latter isn't supported elsewhere and the former is.

Thank you all for working through this! You guys are terrific.

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I think what just happened is

1) we had a rule that said to modernize spellings, and this has been replaced by one that says don't.  Complete turnaround.

2) while the PGMs steam ahead, the rest of us are now on hold waiting for access to baptisms which exist but are not easily accessible

3) somebody now has to tell the gedcommers they need to change loads of spellings

4) a big sign just went up saying WikiTree Is An American Site.  Non-Americans Go Away, You Won't Get It

I'm glad I never put my own ancestors on here.  I wouldn't be up for changing the spellings, and I wouldn't be able to delete them.  A salutary warning about the dangers of single trees.

Meanwhile the stage is set for a war between the people who will make a thing of following the new rule slavishly, and the people who will ignore it, and the people who will be unaware of it, and the people who won't get the implications, because they haven't realised that their sources use standardized spellings, not original spellings.

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I have the perfect solution.  When there is full agreement between all involved projects and profile managers about an LNAB then that is to be made the LNAB.  Any time there is anything less than total unanimity about what the LNAB should be then the LNAB and CLN should be changed to Unknown, all possibilities should be put in Other Names and also explained in the biography.

After all, we have an Unknown's project ... let them start pulling their own weight to find the correct beyond all shadow of anyone's doubt LNAB.

Honestly, folks, this discussion is starting to sound like the presidential debates.  I don't know enough to contribute anything (other than sarcasm), but I really think everyone needs to grow up and recognize the need for some kind of agreement here.

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Oooo Maybe we could have Joseph "Cantdecide" :)

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Gotta give Anne a slap on the wrist for that - wassamatta - don't you know "Cantdecide" is not in keeping with policy on names?  It's gotta be Unknown, girlfriend!!!

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"1) we had a rule that said to modernize spellings, and this has been replaced by one that says don't.  Complete turnaround."

As far as I know we never had this. The wording was confusing (which is why I brought it up) and Chris confirmed that it was not his intention (and it conflicted with the overarching "use their convention not ours.") 

So I don't see this as a major change. Just clarification of what had been confusing and contradictory. 
 

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Of course the majority of immigrants have unknown parentage, and it's only a presumption that they were born with the same name they used later.

In fact a major reason for brick walls, not only immigrants, is that people's births were recorded under a different name.  Not only wives.

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Spelling-fixation is our convention, not theirs.

But "theirs not ours" fell apart years ago when nobody told the gedcommers that they'd have to change Neville to Nevyle and Huntingfield to Huntynggefeilde or whatever.

As for confusion and intention, it's hard to believe that Chris wrote a rule that said to use Winslow not Wynslow if he actually meant the exact opposite.  Clearly the thinking behind the red rule as written is that Winslow and Wynslow are the same name.  But now they're to be treated as two different names.

So now I suppose FitzHugh becomes fys Hewe and Johnson becomes Jhonsonne etc.  For medievals the list goes on for ever.  Not a major change?

Not just medievals though - I've got 19th century Merrills and the name is hardly spelt the same way twice in the records - though it'll be Merrill in any tree I ever do.

Perhaps we need a new thread to work out how this rule change is going to work.

Anybody know how to type a yogh?

Answer 5

Isn't this discussion about LNAB medieval ;-)

In the good old days of computers you had a record and one key that should be unique = LNAB ==> something we need to have but it's irrelevant if its a human readable key like Sälgö-1 or a GUID

Today 2016:

1. We need to have an unique name for a record
2. BUT we can have alternate index keys etc. so we can support alternative spelling names etc.... if we add more name forms....

 What are the User Cases?
A) In a unique way find a profile Check
B) Find duplicates fast and easy Could always be better 
C) Store all name forms on a person Could be better 
D) Easy find a person when searching ??
E) Support searching on just the women birth last name  Check
F) ?????

Solution

Add more fields for different name forms. Not just names but also places....

Maybe solution = templates
A maybe quick and maybe dirty is that we use templates for names and extract the information to an external database to make the impact on the current solution as small as possible....

Comments

You think like me :)

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If the goal is to facilitate building a world-wide tree that links everyone, then we harm that goal by being pedantic about name spelling. In a single document recently I saw Dubois, DuBois, Du Bois and Duboise, all referring to the same person.

I'd argue that what we want to facilitate is searching and matching, and we need multiple last name fields to help accomplish that. LNAB is neither here nor there.

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I worked with text retrieval before it was hot. Then we used a thesaurus 

==>

Instead that we on every profile add more name forms like Anderdotter Andersdtr etc....

Then we in the thesaurus define that a search on Anderdotter is also a search on Anderdtr



Feels like a more mature approach than having every nameform on all profiles....

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Magnus, I agree that a thesaurus would cover most of the naming issues across time and cultures.

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We've got a thesaurus, but we don't use it.

Basically a thesaurus maps all the variant forms to a standard form.  You can do it with a run-time join, but I could think of other ways to improve the search system if the cpu cycles could be spared, which apparently they can't.

Or you can store the standardized form in a separate field, but I don't think Chris is up for adding fields either.

In any case, we could end up exposing the useless authentic form (which could be in the bio and doesn't need to be anywhere else) and hiding the much more useful and Google-friendly standardized form, which would be perverse, like shooting ourselves in both feet with both barrels.

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That's way outside of my wheelhouse. Sounds like at the rate this is going, since there are so many "possible" solutions, that we'll never see a model that works. That's all the chump change I have to spend.

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Interesting that we have a thesaurus.

In Swedish genealogy people used based (Normalized) forms in the old days. Today my feeling you always use the what you find...

Answer 6

Would it be helpful to add the PGM and EuroAristo tags to the original question, as I think much of this discussion is really about LNAB in pre-1700 profiles?

Comments

I'm sure it will be important to them but I also  think  this discussion is  relevant to anyone whose name was written by a parish clerk or the equivalent any where in the world.

 I am following this discussion with interest and have as far as I know no connections with any profiles in either project.

  Here is one of my profiles with multiple variants.. At the moment I don't know what his LNAB should really be (and getting more confused all the time!)

 William and his family were illiterate and probably spoke with a broad local accent, hence the surnames in registers varies considerably.

'''Names'''
At present it is not known where William was born or baptised.
At the  baptisms of children and at his burial his name is recorded as Peasland, At his marriage ie (first known document... should this be LNAB?)  at his wife's parish, two miles down the road, the clerk recorded his surname as Peasnall.
 At the 3rd marriage of daughter Damaris, it is recorded as Pasewell but a witness, who might be his granddaughter signed her name as Ann Pesland   (to add to confusion his son named Peasland in court documents and baptism uses Peasley/Peisely/Piesley in Australia. Is that a deliberate change from Peasland ie an alias ? or is it actually pronunciation that lead to the  variations in what ends up being written?)

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There are many factors, eg

- assimilation - names are influenced by other names and made to conform to patterns

- changes in spelling convention - eg the ea in Peasland would have been pronounced the Irish way, not the modern English way.

- different dialects have different sound systems.  A difference in sound that is significant in one dialect might not be heard at all by a speaker of a different dialect

The notion of an underlying true name doesn't always stand up.  Many people didn't know what their "name" was "supposed" to be.  Other languages reflect this better by saying "I call myself" or "they call me" rather than "my name is".

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Absolutely agree, I  live in very rural France and have regular problems with my inability to distinguish some sounds, most unlike the 'proper' French I learned .  If it were the incumbent or curate filling in the register he might well be in a very similar situation. If it were a local ie the parish clerk, he might  try to write what he heard but be limited by his own abilities. I know of one who couldn't write his own name when he married a few years before becoming clerk.

There are many reasons for the variations but I think we all  probably have  some families that will be affected by variant names .Because of that I think any solution has to apply beyond those "project walls".