How do you deal with patronymics?

Question

Most family names in Europe were not introduced until Napoleonic times.  What do you enter for a famlly name, when a person was only know by his/her first name and partonymic?  So Jason son of John is know as Jason Johnsson.  And his father John was known as John Jacobson and his father as Jacob Robertson.  No family name, althogh there is a clear family lineage.

If you don't use a family name and upload a GEDCOM, you end up with many UNKNOWN's which wikitree suggest skipping.  So how do most of you deal with this?

Answer 1

If you're talking about people in noble houses, check out http://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Name_Fields_for_European_Aristocrats

If you're talking about just regular people, I'd use the patronymic for the last name. My Swedish ancestors had patronymic last names up until about 100 years ago, and I just treat them like any other last name.

To get all philosophical, does it really matter if a last name doesn't stay the same in a family? After all, you don't share a last name with most of your ancestors.

Comments

This is what I am expecting to do if I manage to follow my Danish ancestors far enough back to the patronymics.  A lot of patronymics evolved into family names, so to me it's interesting to see the evolution.

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I'm with Lianne on this one.

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I'm new to this, so I was just trying to get an idea how others approach it.  I also notced that patronymics in my family did not evolve into a family name.  When the choice of a family name was introduced, siblings with the same parents chose different family names.  That can make the job of tracing family roots even more. challeging