I was working on “711 Separators in Prefix” and began to wonder: Should we look at altering the way we handle titles? Many people hold more than one. The current style guidelines say to use the "highest, last or preferred,” and while that makes sense in ranking hierarchies, for example a soldier who advances linearly in rank from Second Lieutenant to First Lieutenant to Captain, it doesn’t work as well for titles that are held concurrently.
“But wait!” you say. “Isn’t that where the ‘preferred’ part of the guidelines come in?” And yes, it is; but the problem with that is that the preferred title can differ depending on the genealogist’s personal preferences, projects, or prejudices.
It also makes for unclean data when we have other important titles stuck into the free text. I know there is not a ton of wholesale data manipulation going on, but given the awesomeness of the Errors Project and the Wikidata integration I think we are moving in that direction (I hope). What if someday we want to programmatically find all the knights with the title Sir, so we can group them appropriately? Sir will almost always be the lessor title held by nobility. And it gets even more murky in places like the USA where we don’t have strict rules of etiquette to fall back on when someone with a military rank has a PhD and got knighted by the crown.
Could we use the structure that allows us to enter multiple spouses to enter multiple titles? Is this something that other people would be interested in, or fell like it is an issue?
