Elizabeth Lee (Woodward) - NAMING_ORDER PATTERNS

You can set your view to show exactly what you want. I suggest you do that. It's all just data in a database and of course we capture all the names a person goes / went by.

For periods of history or regions where the woman did not take the husband's name after marriage, you should not see a name in the last name field that is the husband's.

The best way to know for certain is to have records such as death records, gravestone inscription, etc. and to attach those to the profile.

Unless you have counter evidence, in New England in Colonial America, married women were known by their husband's surname. There are thousands of pieces of evidence for this.

Lilian Huhn Wheeler - I see that you are not only opening discussion - which is fine - but you are changing the surnames of married women in Colonial America on profiles managed by multiple descendants / managers. That is against the Terms of Service of Geni. You cannot go around changing all the profiles to suit your views, it is considered vandalism. Please stop now and change your settings to see only maiden names.

Erica Howton is a good person to ask about surnames in New England of this period.

You'll notice if you read vital records that record second or third marriages of widows that their surname is of their late husband for instance.

But again, you can avoid having to see the evidence of the traditions in New England by just changing your personal preferences for how the name fields are shown to you.

Everyone

Fortunately Geni has a very easy solution to this NON problem.

Go to your account settings > name display preferences

http://www.geni.com/account_settings/name_preferences

Set your preference for birth surname display:

You might want:

Birth surname instead of last name

(your choice of options)

Save, etc.

What everyone needs to understand is this:

We have ancestors who changed their names between the events BIRTH and DEATH.

We are very fortunate to have an application that allows us to enter both values.

This is not just about the so called married name for women under English Common Law.

This is not just about "the genealogy way.". That is old fashioned from paper & pen era.

In the computer era we can customize our views for our own preferences.

In Geni with "smart matching" to RECORDS and trees, we need to maximize our chance to find records. I would NOT be able to find documentation in USA records for my own grandmothers without the display options available.

And I would not be able to find records for my own GRANDFATHER without this option either.

Hope this explanation helps.

Thank you Erica. I didn't understand until your helpful comments that Lilian Huhn Wheeler was motivated by following paper & pen era genealogical practice. Now I do understand and I hope that Lillian understands your comment. Geni is a software tool that uses a database that stores ALL names a person was known by in their life.

You'll be able to see only the maiden names by following Erica's guidance above if that is the way you prefer to do genealogy.

I am sympathetic to the underlying feelings that you have, but frankly, my maiden name is my FATHER's name so I see little difference since we have to have surnames. And ironically his surname was his grandmother's father's surname! My great grandmother was very forceful and had her husband take her surname for some reason.

Hatte my great grandfather took his wife's surname at immigration as his birth surname sounded like a naughty word in English. No one since 1905 knows how it was originally spelled in Cyrillic lettering or in English transposition. I certainly prefer that he show on my tree with a last name he used most of his life however.

The bottom line is that you can do what you want with the profiles that you are the sole manager for.

But you should not edit the profiles that other people manage unless you can show evidence for your changes, with documents.

Also, some of the profiles that Lilian Huhn Wheeler commented on are MPs and in that case she should contact the curator as well as the many managers.