What is her "name at birth" if she was retroactively legitimized?

Question

In order to figure out how best to massage my data to fit into WikiTree's insanely ill-suited name fields, I'd like to know the basic _intent_ behind the fields and their labeling.

Take for example "last name at birth". As the first step, I'm going to make the assumption that "last name" is meant as "surname", not the actual positional role it indicates. (Very Bad Choice of labeling.)

So what does "at birth" mean? My grandmother and her elder brother (and a stillborn sister before them) were born years before their parents married, but by law they were legitimate -- retroactively. This means that technically, their surname for the first years of their lives was legally their mother's, but they were never identified with it, and all later documents (and oral traditions) use their father's surname. (If there had been such a thing as kindergarten, I'm sure my great-uncle would've been registered for it with his father's surname.) Their birth register entries have annotations referring to the retroactive name change, but because register changes/corrections were recorded in separate books, the actual name is not on the register page.

So what is my grandmother's "last name at birth"? Should I be snide and just put in "Gizella", a name that was never used to identify her, but is the actually positionally-last item on her birth register entry? I'm probably going to just put in her father's surname, because that's what her surname was, and the legitimacy complications are really just an anecdote for her bio, but I'd like to know how that conflicts or meshes with the background intentions involved.

Comments

I agree with you. I had to deal with this case several times and went with the "family name" or "surname" as it is on the initial version of the birth record, but I regret it. The name is changed on the parents' marriage and the effect (apparently in several countries, though I can only be sure about France) is retroactive.The very first name ceases to have a legal existence.

Answer 1

"Last name" is intended for surname or family name. Discussions pop up from time to time about relabeling for a more global approach, but with so much already using those labels, it would be a huge undertaking.

As for your grandmother and her siblings names I would personally be inclined to use either what was written at the time of birth or what she would have gone by at the time of birth(if known). The purpose of the field is to identify the original name as opposed to legal changes of name and married names. If you include all the details and reasoning in the bio, I doubt any reasonable choice would be opposed.

Comments

(Changing people's habits would be a huge undertaking, but would changing the field labels really be that big a deal? It'd really just be a few lines in a database, no?)

Thank you for your thoughts. It's hard to figure out the usefulness of an "original name" that was never actually used and qualifies as a legal fiction.

(I still haven't entered anyone on my side. I'm philosophically opposed to putting profiles online for living people, no matter how "private" they're marked.)

---

I suspect the emphasis on surname at birth is a rule to prevent spelling wars between WikiMembers sharing kin in densely populated areas of the tree. In discussions, however, it tends to be taken as an essential phenomenon, rather than a pragmatic rule of thumb.

Records in Sweden usually do not list a surname for a child in the birth record, nor in the household records as long as the children live with their parents. In the routine cases where parents are married we just assume that the child either inherits the family name of the father, if there is one (the mother will usually have a different surname) or we assume that the child has a gendered patronym after the father. We rarely have surprises when the offspring come into their own, so we get into the habit of considering "at birth" more like "first known".

Of course the game is complicated by pre-marital and extra-marital children - and also by the way that people from patronymic families in Sweden freely adopted surnames when they "went to town". I'd say: sources, sources, sources - plus a bit of common sense. One might think that common sense does not say the same thing in different cultures, but in your case I see that Greg and I both agree with your choice of the father's surname.

Answer 2

Hello J,
Your grandmother's story is a good example of how it's not always possible to fit the facts into the blanks on the page.  
You could fill in last name at birth with the original name and use the fields "other last names" and "current last name" to specify different changes.
I had a similar problem with two profiles, which you're welcome to look at.
Clements-3358 and Richmond-2234