Why does gedcom download of your tree only contain First, Nickname, Last on Download?

Question

Downloaded McIntyre-767 complete family tree for my backups and all individuals were missing middle names as entered. First, Nickname and Last, were there, but does no good to have 20 people all with the same name appearance but with middle names that are different, if the middle name is absent.

Answer 1

I know of no desktop genealogy software that has a field for middle names, although it may exist. I suspect your software cannot handle this non-standard field, and if anything, it goes into an error file.

It should not be a difficult for a good programmer to write a routine to concatenate the current first and middle name fields, and eliminate the middle name field from the system. I suspect, however, this will never happen.

Comments

Thank-you, It kind of looked curious as when I download from elsewhere, they automatically insert into the given name field, by some some such statement as If Middle=True, Then Given = Given,Middle
I'll have to figure out a better way of making backups Thanks again!

Answer 2

It should download the middle name.

I exported https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Anderson-21671 into a test GEDCOM.

It combined her first, middle, and maiden using a NAME tag.

It also exported just her middle name with the custom _MIDN tag.

Comments

Thank-you for your answer. What genealogy software are you using? I would be a time saver for me to use that for my Wikitree downloads. It does appear to be a fault of software I am using.

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I just checked the GEDCOM file in a text editor. I'm not sure which genealogy software will allow you to import non-standard fields like _MIDN.