If a surname has multiple spellings, do I use it for all members of that family?

Question

My 2nd great-grandmother Fannie's maiden name was Eison. I have found at least 5 different versions of the name on official documents for the same family members. Do I only use the alternate last names that I found on records specific to her on her profile, or should I use all the variations on her profile and for every family member's profile too?

Answer 1

Hi A!  Thank you for joining our one world WikiTree!

No, you enter the Last Name at Birth as it is listed in the records or as the person spelled it themselves.  Most names have multiple spellings, or so it seems.  I have lots of different spellings even for the surname Smith.  (" SCHMIDT (16489) SMIT (7049) SCHMITT (4998) SMYTH (3679) SCHMITZ (2763) SCHMID (2254) SMITHERS (1232) SMYTHE (1232) SMITHSON (1223) SMITS (929) SMIDT (344) SMID ")  So use the spelling the person used for their own records.

Edit ~~~~: Maybe I misunderstood the question, but I try to follow this instruction, "Use their conventions instead of ours

We aim to use the names that people themselves would have known and that would have been recognized in their own time and place.

This is true for the "official name fields", Proper First Name and Last Name at Birth, and it's also true for the "preferred name fields", Preferred First Name and Current Last Name. These are meant to be the names they would prefer, not the names we prefer to call them.

At first this may seem overly complicated. We know what we would prefer but often cannot know what they would prefer. However, creating a single worldwide family tree requires a universal standard. "We" depends on who is speaking and the language they're speaking in. Therefore, it cannot be universal.

For example, English-speaking WikiTree users know William the Conqueror. But French-speakers know Guillaume le Conquérant. Even if 90% of current WikiTree users speak English, William should be Guillaume in our database because he himself spoke French. We can all share one profile even though we don't share one language.

This applies for names with accented characters, and even for languages with non-Latin alphabets. WikiTree can accept most character sets, such as Cyrillic, Chinese, and Arabic.

Note that English translations can go in the less formal fields, such as Nicknames and Other Last Names. And biographies can be written in multiple languages."

Comments

It is perfectly acceptable to use a single spelling for all the members of a nuclear family, even if the earliest record has a variant spelling, particularly if the family name was more commonly spelled in a different way at the time of the birth.  The variant spelling may be a one-off, but should still be recorded under "Other Last Names".

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My question was specifically for what should be entered under Other Last Names. All the versions I've found on records like death certificates and census records, etc., and whether I should include those Other Last Names on all the profiles of all the members of the family.

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A -- I would only add the most commonly found other variants.  All the rest, the one-off types, can go under a == Research Notes == header above the == Sources == header.

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Okay, thank you.

Answer 2

I have a German family that I put in, living in Adelaide. They changed their name to sound more English. But not everyone in the family changed their name, because some of the children had become adults at the time. So LNAB is listed, as was listed on each of their Birth Records. The change of last name was added, only for those who had a change of name in later documents. Those who didn't make the change, I didn't show a change. In other words, just leave it as an individual thing. For each person, put their details in, as they exist in their records. The only time I wouldn't put LNAB as it appears in their records, is if it appears that it was a mistake, such as a bad transcription, or misspelling from what is otherwise very consistent in the family.