Charles "Martel", Duke of the Franks - Record of Alternative Data After Merges

Sharon, I like the solution you've adopted. I agree that putting names in the AKA doesn't do much for clarity, even if it helps the searches.

Erica, the name he's "most commonly known" as depends on when you went to school. Older people will say "Martel". Younger people will say "the Hammer". I have dozens of books about this period. In general, they all give both names but the newer ones use the newer standard.

Judy and Michael, I know. Don't you just hate it when you log on to a genealogy website and people are talking about names and dates and history and stuff? ;)

I love subject of this discussion, should have The Hammer and Martel in at least the front part of his name. Everyone or at least of us know him that way. This makes it easier to know where you are in the tree, add info and reference him AKA in the last name as you just mentions sounds good to me, since we don't know what his last name was. talking about history. History is one of my favorite subjects. But I just think ,that sometime people get a little long winded and overbearing about it on Geni. Obviously we want to be correct. But you still do need using Charles as he is the sub

Well the beginning was suppose to read . I love history not I love the subject of this discussion. I have always loved history. My favorite subject. Charles the subject of this discussion should read Charles Martel "The Hammer" in the first part of his name .

Judy, I don't want to tick you off again but a small clarification -- it's not that we don't know his surname, it's that he didn't have a surname. The Romans had surnames but they fell out of use in the 4th and 5th centuries, then no one in western Europe had surnames again until about the 12th and 13th centuries.

I know that . We don't know his last name because he didn't have one. I think I alluded to that several paragraphs ago. I am not ticked off. I just get tired of all the nic picking.

Some people like history for the stories. Other people are also interested in the details.

Erica, in all Northern Europe and not only in Germany he goes by the name 'Karl Martell'.

Justin.. I don't have a problem with dates and names and history.. It's the constant back and forth aruguments i can't stand.

Sharon Doubell It wasn't personal. I was just saying I was getting tired of them consantly aruguing over this. You could say I was tired of them Hammering this argument over names back and forth!

It really drives me nuts when they argue over simple things.. I mean santa or jesus is said diffrently in country after country yet each allows the other to name what he or she wants of it with out asking it be changed every 30 min.

I just think unless of course some one has really screwed up impossible data that we should let this one lie.. I mean that's what the alt or also known as section was designed for was it not?

MIke, Hammering, I like that analogy!

Michael, when someone is doing research it's important to get these details. If someone thinks "Oh, close is good enough" they aren't a very good researcher. The big advantage of a website like Geni is that we can get closer and closer to the real data. Charles the Hammer appears in many private trees on many other websites, but only a few of them are really interested in the details. Most people just want to brag about their royal ancestors but get bored as soon as the discussion digs into the details.

True. My point was there is a subfield for what the person is known as that can be filled in as well to solve the what is he to the americans brits etc etc.

Pipin, is an example. There are several of them. If you didn't as Pipin the Short or Pipin , whatever, at the moment aI can't remember all of them, you wouldn't know which one was which and don't forget the dates too. Colin Campbell's another one. One Colin Campbell, had several wives and mistresses and all of them had a Colin Campbell. Try sorting that one out without dates and nick names, if they had any. Charles Martel wasn't he somehow connected to one of the Pipins. Not sure about that. Need to pull my stuff out of boxes and look it up

Steven Spielberg oh shoot wrong steve you,d think with all the cash he made on hooking us with ipads he would have spent some of it on bug fixing. I ment steve jobs not steve speilberg the actor ha ha. For some reason on i 5.1.1 i cant tag profiles but when i can they are the wrong ones.. Lol

I ment to tag charlimange pepins dad as a good example. In the field view it has his english name his german name and so on

A pipin was Charlemagne's father and I was right all the Pipins' are connected to Charles Martel..I JUST LOOKED IT UP.

Naturally you would add nicknames and dates. Why wouldn't you?

The discussion here has been about how to handle nicknames. Original language (Martellus) or translated (the Hammer) or traditional (Martel)?

It's hard to imagine that anyone can think there's a right or wrong answer, when the experts themselves have changed their ways of doing it.

The idea that nicknames should be translated is something that started with the Annales school at the Sorbonne in Paris after World War II. The idea is to make history more accessible to the common people. Also, to make history more about the lives of the common people rather than just kings and nobles. Part of the idea has been to take royalty off their pedestals and to treat them as human beings.

The Annales style has been very influential in France, Britain, and America. I was very surprised when Sten said (above) that historians in "Northern Europe" reject it (that they still use Karl Martell), but maybe it is too much associated with democracy and egalitarianism -- or maybe just too much with the French ;)

My point was and is , it gets dicey without them. We 've all run across , before or after or between
such and such date. It happens. Just the way it is sometimes.

Judith, Pepin II 'The Short' is my 36th great grandfather, so. Actually this was made well known within the family since 1st half of the 20th century.

Michael, if I had not clicked on Charles "the Hammer" as he was originally showing up in my family tree I would not have recognized him as Charles Martel. Only after I did open up his information did I realize who he was and what he meant historically. So I almost went right past him as I would not have ever seen the "subfield" of AKA's and nicknames and would not have ever known of family connection to Charles Martel.

Happened to me too, since I know the man from my school history as 'Karl Martel'... That said, the AKA field is quite useful for search purposes, because it connects alternative names to the search field. I entered Karl Martell and got straight Charles Martell 'The Hammer' as well :)

Same for me. I never heard of Charles "the Hammer."

Sten, until I started doing Genealogy ,maybe 30 years or , ago, I had never heard of any of the Pipins. Then while tracking down my James Taylor, Tresure of Mass Bay Prov.born 1646, and made a call to the NEHG in Boston, and got a gentleman who was very interested in this Taylor family, I never heard of a lot of people in my tree/ Some of o'course I had heard of but a lot no. Anyway, I went into Boston and he help me with the research. Basically he found the right books , handed them to me and showed me how to back track in them and he also gave me a list that he had compiled, maybe 7 or 8 generations back. The rest I found myself. I just sat there and backtracked and wrote everything down. Then went home a sorted it all out. I went back again , to make sure I did it correctly.

Erica, you and I are the same age. I would have thought we had similar history books. I learned about Charles the Hammer in high school history. I didn't find out he was called Charles Martel until college in Western Civ.

I'm beginning to suspect that some of you slept through history class ;)

If my old historiography professor were still alive, I'd give him a call to razz him that historians still aren't doing a very good job of making history accessible to kids. Come to think of it, maybe not. He'd want me to give an oral presentation on the ages groups and geographic distribution of adults who knew and didn't know ;)

Discussions like this serve the purpose of recording how we collectively figured out what the best representation of the historical facts on Geni would look like.
So, Michael - it's useful to hammer the evidence to the wall where we can consult it next time, instead of starting again from square one next year when someone else queries it. I don't see any squabbles going down here, and I fully expect that we'll discuss it again in the future (Sorry about the report if you weren't being personal - I don't know who was offended.)

Sten, good to know that the Geni search engine is functioning so well. I filled in the Latin and German names he was known by in that era, which Erica gave us yesterday. So, if you view his profile in German, you’ll see him as Karl Martell.

The English bleed through on the suffix titles is because we don’t have language specific titles entered: Anyone who wants to provide them is most welcome (Nederlands,Français,Deutsch).

OTHERWISE I THINK THIS ROUND OF DISCUSSION ON HIS NAMING CAN BE CONSIDERED TO BE CLOSED.
THANK YOU ALL FOR PARTICIPATING

Oh sorry - crossposting in the middle of your discussion :-(
Not intentional...
Re-opened :-)

Justin - now you'll have me hauling out Toynbee & Gibbon. :)

I was light on formal history classes on the East Coast but it was classics oriented for world history it seems. I placed out of the intro to history courses in college. Structuralism was the academic fashion in my college days and oriented to colonialism; I don't recall what Fanon & Malcolm X had to say on this though. :):)

OK this guy isn't covering the name particularly, but he's making the history come alive for the next generation:

http://minimumwagehistorian.com/2011/11/11/charles-the-hammer-martel/