Is it a good idea to add "married names" to ancestors who did not use them?

Question

I'm very uncomfortable when I see a person listed as, for example, Marie Gagnon formerly Landry, when in fact this person was never called Marie Gagnon when she was living.  Our French-Canadian and Acadian ancestors did not call women by their husbands' names before the 20th century.  Not only is it inaccurate, which is not good, but it makes searching and matching females much more difficult than it needs to be.  Is there any way we could agree to just leave that married name field blank for women who in fact never used one?

Answer 1

It  is definatly a good idea not to use 'married names' when in fact the women themselves did not use them, one of the principals of wikitree is to name things as the people themselves did. If women did not change their names we should respect that.

Comments

This reminds me of another thought.  I believe one of the other principlels was to use the suffixes "Sr." and "Jr." as they were used when the child was born... consequently there shouldn't be many Srs.  Following this principle of using the name as they were born, means using the maiden name for all women.

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Another thought:  After a divorce, I changed my "chattel" name to my own middle name, which was my mother's birth name, Burnett. Thus I was ignorant of the surname naming traditions. My father, understandably, was quite perturbed. He had been born with his mother's surname, Berg, and considered it a mark he did not want to (and did not have the tools to) explain. Only one person in the next 35 years asked me where did I get my name, a cousin (found through ftdna I think). His Q appeared on ancestry.com from TX, and that relatively recently.

Burnett is my legal name now. To use my father's adoptive surname causes genealogical confusion (though I feel I should have been born with the Berg surname). Using his mother's birth surname (Berg) for US records searches is fruitless, with THE exception: his arrival at Ellis Island under his birth surname. I suspect that his adoptive name was used on CT school records, which I don't seem to be able to find at ancestry, with one exception, a school singing group.

Answer 2

Thank you for the question Linda. I just learned something new about Acadian ancestors.  Would it be possible to have a field "Preferred surname" or something like that? The same as we have a field for "proper first name" and a field for "preferred first name"? would that weight the preferred surname in a search engine?

Comments

We have a prefered suname it is the LNAB, with the changes that have started today in name displays it should become more obvious.

Answer 3

While back Lianne went through and changed the display last names for the Acadian women just for that reason.

I believe part of the problem is in the set up of the entry data that always used married name if there is one.  I'd prefer that the default be the maiden name and that  one would have to select a specific option in order to use the married name as the display name.

I'm biased in that I prefer that all profiles of women use the maiden name as the display name, regardless of whether they are Acadian or not.  This is the only site I've ever seen that defaults to the married name.  

Currently I  leave the married name blank and put the married name under "other name" so that it doesn't show up as the display name, but it should show up in searches under the married name.

Comments

See, that's a very big part of the problem:  the person shows up in searches under the married name, which is very frustrating.  Especially for people with Marie in their names.  Try looking for Marie Martin, and you have to wade through dozens of people not named Martin (but married to one), not to mention all the people named Marie-Anastasie or whatever.  I'm importing gedcoms right now, and a huge amount of time is wasted rejecting "matches" with people with a different surname.  It's exasperating.  So putting the name in another field doesn't help.  And again, it's inaccurate, since that was never their name in any way.

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I could be wrong, but in that case the name will show up in your list as Marie LNAB and not Marie Martin.  That Is IF the Martin is listed under "other name"

I tested it out with my Francois Gallien that has Gallier as other name (due to the name changing over time).  When I searched for Francois Gallier it did come up, but as Francois Gallien.  The same thing should happen if it were Francoise Gallien who married a Gallier.  If I were looking for a women with the maiden name of Francoise Gallier, Francoise Gallien would show up, but in the Gallien form so I'd immediately illiminate it if I knew the maiden name of the person I was looking up was Gallier.

The way it currently works, it would and is a problem like you state, but not when the married name is listed under other name instead of the display name.

The upside to this is that is if I'm looking for the wife of the man named Gallier and I know her first name is Francoise, but I don't know her maiden name, then she will come up when I search for someone by the first name and married name.

Does that make sense?

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No, it isn't confusing.  I know these are not matches immediately.  But in the first place, only a limited number of people are displayed, and half the space is wasted by people who shouldn't be in the list, so that actual matches are not displayed.  Plus, it's just harder to hunt through a list with so many extra people in it.  And in the second place, when I'm trying to upload a gedcom, I can't import it if there are too many "matches," and if half the "matches" are bogus, that's a serious problem.  And all of this is caused by entering information that is incorrect, to begin with.  Why would we want to do that?  They never used these names in the original records.  I can see that you might, very rarely, wish to find a woman whose maiden name is unkown, but in that case, you generally know her husband's name and can search for that.  I don't want to see inaccurate information just for that very small convenience--especially since it carries with it a very significant inconvenience.

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It's just not true that they "never" went by those names.  Many early censuses record widows as Veuvre "husbands last name".  There also are a handful of records that do use the married name for the wife... for whatever reason.

It wasn't all that long ago that I downloaded my gedcom and it was a definite pain for so many reasons.  It was really difficult to tell if the match that it recommended was correct, especially since there are still so many duplicate profiles out there.  If a match wasn't obvious I  went ahead and downloaded it as a new profile and dealt with finding the matches later.

The main issue, and one on which we agree, is that the maiden name should be the  display name on the profile for Acadian women and others with similar naming structures.  

I  think that should be the rule for all women regardless of heritage.  And, regarding the preponderance of Maries out there...  I will put the first name as "Marie Francoise" rather than putting Marie under first name and Francoise as middle name.  Because of there being so many people with the same first names in a family I wish the display name always included the middle name in order to help separate people out.  The same issues arise with my German ancestors where they typically have 4 prenames and typically (but not always) go by the 2nd or 3rd of those names.

Thankfully, dates are included when one does a people search, but there are other ways, like we've been talking about)  to help make using the searches with a large number of results easier to manage.

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They did not use their husband's name in any records for the birth of children nor their burial records.  I've seen thousands of these original records, and I've never seen it, not one single time.  Check their signatures--they signed their name the same all their lives.  Census records are about families, not individuals.  We have an obligation to the people we chronicle to be sensitive to their cultures and their preferences, and not impose our own on them.

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And that is why I agree that the display name should be the maiden name.

We should also make it possible for other family historians to connect the dots... thus the "other" name. That's just my opinion on the usage of the husbands last name in the "other name" parameter here on wikitree.

I don't disagree about what name they used, etc.... just how their names sometimes show up in records that we use in our research and how to facilitate that research for those with less info. Again just my opinion.

Donna

Answer 4

I believe it is important to use all the names related to any givien individual. I prefer to put the middle name with the given name so that it makes the name that more unique. This is especially important for European names.Germanic people tend to give a lot of names to their children, and sometimes every son has the father's name as his first name.  A family can have several Johanns for example. I would not want to see them listed as Johann A., Johann J. and Johann W., but rather Johann Adam, Johann Jacob and Johann Wilhelm. If we enter every possible name, and wikitree does not change anything to an intital, we will be able to keep everyone straight. Maybe even the 25 Rosario Centanni's!

 

Using the maiden name and the husband"s name helps us find the people that woman is related to, and the marriage records. If the woman never really married the guy, then no, she does not deserve her husband's last name.

Please be sure that wikitree can search all name fields.

I also dislike the use of an initial for the middle name instead of the full middle name. Not everyone uses just an initial. I have not entered my own middle name because I do not want it showing up as an intitiol. I put my maiden name as part of my given name to make sure it shows up in full. You can call me Sharon Troy Centanne,  or Sharon Marie Centanne, but never Sharon M. Centanne.

Troy-204

Comments

SO should I list my full present name as Roberta Burnett Burnett or Roberta Burnett The latter is legal, but Burnett was my birth middle name. (Can we genealogists become too factitious?)