What should LNABs be for people caught in change from patronymics to real last names?

Question

I am starting to work on a large branch of the family in the gedcom I adopted, who lived during the time that the patronymic custom in Germany was changed by a riquirement to have a real surname.  These people's LNABs on their profiles are almost all the real surname but all the sources list them as (for example):

Jacob David became LOEWENSTEIN

In this example, his father is David Jakob, whose father was Jakob Moyses,

There are a lot of these - probably between 50 and 100 - maybe more.  What is the best thing for me to do with them?  I have been putting the patronymic in the "other last names" field, but should I make all the LNAB changes to use the patronymic as LNAB and make the real surname (which is now the LNAB) into current last name?  I know we prefer to keep merges to a minimum, plus the tree makes a lot more sense with the surname, and surname lists would be very discontinuous for these families if the patronymics were used for their LNABS.

I'd appreciate some direction on which way to go with these.  THANX!

Answer 1

We have an analogous situation for New Netherland Settlers, except the transition from patronymics to "real" surnames was gradual, and it's often hard to tell what name(s) a person or family was actually using (not to mention wild variations in spelling in the records, due to the mingling of people from the Netherlands, France, England, Scotland, Germany, and other places). A few families used modern-style surnames from the time of first settlement in the first half of the 1600s, while others used patronymics well into the 1700s.

The general rule for New Netherland has been to use a patronymic for the LNAB if it appears (from records and/or from background information about the family and the community) that's what was being at the time of a person's birth. If the person was later identified by a modern-style surname, that goes into the Current Last Name field. Alternate spellings of both patronymics and surnames go into the Other Last Names field. New Netherland women typically didn't use their husbands' names, but if they did, a woman's married name goes into the Current Last Name field, thus increasing the number of Other Last Names.

Yes, the lack of continuity in last names can make it more difficult to keep track of families, but patronyms do make it easier to connect children with their fathers. The New Netherland Settlers project has tried to maintain a modicum of predictability by trying to adopt a consistent LNAB for an entire family (at least there will be one last name for an entire set of siblings), rather than using whatever bizarre spelling shows up in the oldest available record for each child.

Comments

For the Dutch Roots Project we use almost the same approach, don't know what the German Roots Projects approach is though. I do know that in the Netherlands, sometimes children would adopt different last names, so not the same as the one siblings and/ or their parents adopted. So if there's a name adoption register somewhere (don't know how this was done in Germany exactly) you could check that of course , in Holland, the name adoptions can be found from about 1811 in some of the archives..