Naming Conventions for the Historical Tree on Geni

Pam wrote: "The place name for where a life event occurred (birth, marriage, death) should match the name of the place at that historical period in time"

Who shall decide which name is the historical correct for a given time. The sources we have are ususally written by someone not local to the farm, community or area that the names they have written down belongs to. Over a couple of years I have seen the same farmname written several different ways in the churchbooks here in Norway, I don't think it is different elsewhere. It's the same in the censuses. So which name shall we use when you have 5 different spelled names of the same farm during a couple of years, and who has the guts to say that one way to spell it is more correct than the other?

It's easier when using areas as big as countries, but birth, marriage and death events happens on a local spot, usually a farm or city, and it's impossible to be historical correct using the farmnames and how they were spelled for a given time. The result would be that the same place will have a lot of different spellings, and in my mind that is only going to make a mess.

This discussion comes up a couple of times each year in the norwegian genealogical forums. Some want it historical correct for a given time, and some are normalizing and using the same names all the time. When asked to give a list over historical correct names for the farms inside a county they find out that the job is impossible to do, just because they don't know which name is the historically correct one and it is impossible to find out, and the job is far to big to do.

Anne, Very nice work on the Wiki page. Made minor changes.

The problem with place names is three-fold.
1) Most people don't know the historical names.
2) Many places, especially with the changing borders, in Europe had MULTIPLE names at the SAME time!
3) There is no universal data-base that correlates these names over time (JewishGen's Shtetle pages do a great job, but for only a very specific segment of Europe).

So even if everybody used the "correct" historical names, and this would give the most accurate HISTORICAL data, this would be much less useful for people looking at the tree NOW. I would like to be able to see immigration / movement patterns across time, but if we used only historically relevant names, my relatives could stay in the same city for 200 years, and the name would be different in each generation...

Shmuel
I agree with what you have said regarding “Historical Place Names”, and can understand that not everyone will have a full understanding of the exact meaning of a geographical location.
Unfortunately after 30 years of working a Cartographic Researcher I have had to come to terms with people who have insisted that they lived in the county of their postal address and not the county of their local government. Things can change and the problem starts when, say, the Post Office refuses to use the newer location designation.
How does a “Historical Place Name” effect ones’ family tree?
I work for a government department, where the question of Nationality and country names came up.
We were taking about the county name changes which are taking place today, and how this affects how we enter a nationality into a database. The country in question was Cambodia, formerly known as Kampuchea, or Khmer Republic.
The legal answer was
1 – We have to use the name agree to by the UN
I.E. Macedonia/Македонија; officially the Republic of Macedonia (Република Македонија, transliterated: Republika Makedonija, one of the successor states of the former Yugoslavia, from which it declared independence in 1991. It became a member of the United Nations in 1993 but, as a result of a dispute with Greece over its name, it was admitted under the provisional reference of the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, sometimes abbreviated as FYROM.
2 – We have to recognise the nationality of a person’s passport or legal documentation
I.E. If a person has a passport which states the nationality as “Southern Rhodesian” then that is their legal nationality status and they must not be noted as being “Zimbabwean”
In the historical context I have ancestors who died in the crusades.
What should the place of death be recorded as?
1- The Holy Land
2- Palestine
3- Israel
As for the place of birth v Nationality. (This is a very tricky subject.)
Is your nationality the same as your county of birth?
I hope that most of us would say ‘no’. Nationality is not dependant on race, or cread.
I am happy so see that Gene does not have a field for “Nationality”, but does have one for “Ethnicity” {An ethnic group (or ethnicity) is a group of people whose members identify with each other, through a common heritage, consisting of a common language, a common culture (often including a shared religion) and a tradition of common ancestry (corresponding to a history of endogamy).}
How are people using this field?
There is no simple answer.

May be Historiacal place name may be changed with gegraphical location?
for me it may be very useful bcs, village where was born my father does not exists in present days. in futer may be added relation geographic -> Historical Country,City, if we know period when somebody live and point on the earh it is not so difficult to find Histical place name.

Valeriy, one of my most prized possessions is a large-format World Atlas, printed in 1940 or so, as WWII was just beginning (they promise an update after the war). The maps (and index) for East-Europe has many thousands of towns and villages (some with populations in the hundreds) that were literally "wiped off the map" and no longer exist. I doubt you could even find the ruins these days.

Shmuel, I've got one from 1939 (I believe that's the year). I love it. Found it in an old farm house.

I also have a 1939 atlas and it shows the boundaries of the day.

I also have a "Daily News" "Key Atlas to a reconstructed world" from 1922 showing the changes after WW1.

One problem with maps and atlases - they can be out of date before they are printed.

You should never take a non-offical publication as being absolutely correct.

Even the official maps produced by some counties do not show enerything.

Some map publishers also add fake locations in order to try and catch potential copyright violations.

Kim

That is correct and also bridges going over instead of under.

Chiming in here!

I am broad agreement with most of this discussion, EXCEPT one thing.

Putting titles in the "suffix" field is profoundly unwise, as is putting them in the "last name". Doing either of those is what is technically called "overloading" the field: the suffix field is for suffixes, using it for suffixes AND titles overloads the field.

As Knut Stangenberg remarked a week or so ago, a title is something qualitatively quite different from a name: you can be walking down the street minding your business and have your title change (if you are the eldest son of someone with a hereditary title, and the previous title holder dies). You can acquire and lose titles. You can have many titles.

And there is no single format for titles. Some fit the "[title] First Last" structure, others fit "First [title] Last", still more follow "First Last [title]", and of course the ever popular combinations: "[title] First [more title] Last [another title]".

So jamming all that in the "suffix" field is unhelpful, and it gets impossible when in recognize you may also want the suffix field for, well, suffixes.

The right place for titles is in the DISPLAY NAME and/or occupation fields. My recommendation is to use both: Barack Hussein Obama may well have "President Barack Obama" as the display name (which is what people want to see on the tree) and "43rd President of the United States" as the occupation.

Another problem with using the suffix or name fields comes with the ecclesiastic folk: Rodrigo Borgia was better known as Pope Alexander VI, but from a genealogical standpoint the key is that his name was Borgia, hence the connection with Lucrezia etc. There is no genealogical value in knowing he was Alexander VI instead of Alexander V, and so on.

I agree with you completely, Malcolm Arthur Christopher, all the way until you said "The right place for titles is in the DISPLAY NAME ....." Titles are not names and should never ever be in a name field. So President Barack Hussein Obama shall have Barack Hussein Obama in his name fields, and President as his occupation. His name is not President, that's his job. And the same goes for kings, princes, counts, and so on.......

Huh... I think I disagree about the core purpose of the DISPLAY NAME field.

I guess the two main camps are that:

(a) it is place to put the name the individual was commonly known as, so that Henry Rider Haggard (the novelist) would appear as "H. Rider Haggard", which was his public identify, or...

(b) it is a place to put the full, formal 'style' or identifier of the person, which in this case would be "Sir Henry Rider Haggard, KBE".

Unfortunately, my example was a poor one. Being President is, indeed, just a job (except, perhaps, in North Korea?). But there are people whose "common identifier" isn't (just) their name. A good example is Arthur Wellesley, who is better known as the Duke of Wellington. So his actual honest-to-goodness name as signed on documents was "Wellington".

So I (and Wikipedia, come to that) would display his name as "Arthur Wellesley, 1st Duke of Wellington", and note in the occupation field that he was a Field Marshal, politician and prime minister.

I guess my policy is to try to think what some stranger would think of as an entry's name, and try to incorporate that in the display name field. So I'd have "General Douglas MacArthur" and "President Dwight Eisenhower", because it is that particular position that truly identify the individual: there are plenty of Douglas MacArthurs throughout history, but only one that said "I will return!"

Malc.

In the Display name field then it should say: I will return Douglas Mac Arthur" :-)

Well, enough of the jokes. It's called Disply name, general, president, prime minister, king or "I will return" are not names. And implicitly then should not be in a name field........ or ???

The reason why I sometimes want to see non-names in fields displayed when navigating/merging is, of course, for disambiguation.
We're all familiar with the old "star" notation (which shoul dprobably be considered replaced by the "master profile" concept); at other times, having a "King" or "Opplendingejarl" in a displayed field makes life a little easier.

I don't like display name much, because it hides the other names. But if suffix is to be kept "clean" of no-name information, I suppose that's the best place for it.

Why not ask Geni to add Title prefix?
Many genealogy software has this.

Remi,

When you say "general, president, prime minister king" are not names, you aren't in fact totally correct, at least with regard to the last one.

The Duke of Somewhere's signature would read "Somewhere"; it is (or could be) his legal signature. Granted, it's a different _sort_ of name, something a little bit more like a stage name for an actor than a birth name, but nonetheless it is a name. Likewise, "Alexander" is a perfectly valid name, and Rodrigo Borgia was simultaneously known by that name and his papal name, Pope Alexander VI.

We are in complete agreement that these sorts of things don't belong in the core first, middle, last, suffix set of variables. But they are "names" in the sense of "identifiers" (a valid meaning of the word "name"), so there's no reason not use the "display name" field simply because it has the word "name" in it!

I agree that it is slightly annoying that a display name tends to mask the underlying "core" names, but I have much greater confidence that Geni will come up with ways to select how you want your data displayed rather than brand new fields in the underlying database, which would need to be populated for everyone out there.

I would also argue AGAINST a separate "Title" field, precisely because (as I've pointed out before), there are people with parts of their title before their name, in the middle, and after their name:

Vice Admiral Horatio, Lord Nelson, Viscount and Baron Nelson, Duke of Bronte in Sicily.

(And that's not all of them, but I left his doctorate, his KCB, a couple more Sicilian orders and an Ottoman one).

So what would go in this new "title" field?

And, more to the point, if we shovel all that into a new field, what goes in the "display name" field?

What I would like is for the names that an individual was/is known by to be put in the display name, so you may have "Erik Ivan Weisz aka Harry Houdini" as a display name, with only the first part in his core name fields. Then if Geni would provide options similar to the ones we have for displaying maiden names, casual users would see the display name by default, while advanced users could select either display name, true name or both.

Putting titles in the namefield makes it more difficult to create an accurate tree because a person might have lots of titles and might have been added in different langues.
Titles in name field are ony important to those that collect relatives with titles.
For those that are more interested in the persons behind the name titles are only one small part of those persons.

By the way I do not think that anyone would enter a CEO, general manager etc of a company with titles in the name field!

For informations on german "graf" read the article in the gernman Wikipedia:

http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graf

When a title is used we usually only use the most known title and put it into the suffix. Remember that you can use events to list time period related titles and I have tried to use that on some royal profiles.

Titles.

Titles are not a name and are only assorted with the named person at a given date.
I am finding that people are placing “Titles” in
1 - the middle name field
2 – the first name field
3 - the surname field
And so on.
One of the questions was should a title be placed in the occupation field?
But Gene only has a “Worked” for page where the occupations can be listed.
Otherwise this area and its fields would be ideal for entering titles together with the dates.
The worked for field could well be “the King of England” or “the Crown”.
How would others see this?
Gene will need to get away from its US orientated field naming and planning as the information is to be formatted in pre-Columbus terms.

Malcolm, I can relate to what you're writing, but I still disagree. The duke is probably not born a duke, neither is the king. The pope is absolutely not born a pope.

And in genealogy the international standard is that persons should be registered with the name they are born with/baptized or the earliest name we have sources for. All other names are secondary. Even in todays modern times, women should be registered with the name they are born with/baptized and not the name they're married into. So Lord Nelsons name is Horatio Nelson, you could put Edmundson in the middle name field for identication purposes.

I also wish there were a lot more option for different names on the same person in Geni, but that wish is secondary to the most important one which is to get the ability to add sources and their reliabilty to each and every event just like it is in most personal genealogy programs. So far sources has a long way to go yet, to be good enough here on Geni.

Remi,

You know I'm all for sourcing I think! Can I ask a couple of questions?

- Middle names which are not middle names are very confusing to me. We have the display name field. Why can't we use that for identification?

- What does "register" mean exactly in genealogical terms? To me, we are using software, not getting a government document.

Remi,

I think we're talking at cross purposes! I've not even vaguely suggested putting titles in the core name fields, and in fact I'm arguing against this somewhat goofy idea of overloading the suffix field by using a suffix for both a suffix and a title.

The issue is what the GENI field "display name" should be used for. By your own argument, there's nothing that _must_ go in there, because the vital data is in the first/middle/last/suffix/birth name fields.

So there's NO disagreement that Horatio Edmundson Nelson is the (only) data that should be in the first/middle/last/suffix fields.

Note that I am deliberately including the suffix field, since Martin Luther King Sr is not the same person as the American civil rights leader Martin Luther King Junior. And we are totally in agreement that stuffing other stuff in those fields is unhelpful: the guy's name is "Martin Luther King Jr", not "Martin Luther King Rev Dr Jr", which is what you get if you stick titles in the suffix!

I've just done a quick test, and you'll be pleased to know that Geni doesn't export "Display Name" in its GEDCOM files, which supports what you say about "registering" people: Geni seems to treat "Display Name" as something quite like the pictures: it makes the site tree view prettier, but doesn't impact the serious data underneath.

Malcolm,

You and I are on the same page! I use "suffix" for Sr., Jr., etc. and very reluctantly at times for Rev. or Dr., which should really be "prefixes."

We are agitating geni (without a March on Washington) for "prefix" and have been using "occupation" for "titles." I only use "display name" for very well known people.

But I'm not working in the Royal lines with multiple language needs. They're the ones who **really** feel the pain.

Very confused here!! I've been putting titles to the names of historical figures...should I remove these? I would put them in the nicknames section, but they are hardly nicknames, are they? However, I have no desire to add to the confusion, so will do whatever makes it easier for everybody. On the other hand, I find the titles with the names very helpful when it comes to checking out profiles before merging. I'm a bit nervous here. While I know that it helps if we all follow the same rules, I'm worried that we seem to be making a "committee" move here, i.e. that we are heading down the path of giving the rules of genealogical "reporting", as it were, above other concerns? I have to admit that I'm too focussed on getting my tree right, re: making sure that the information is correct, to take note of the naming conventions, figuring that I can attend to this later. But it's obviously causing grief for those who are trying to clean up the tree, and so as I say, I shall change all my historical profiles if this helps. :)

Lynne,

1. What part of the tree are you working in? That way I can tag the curators to make sure they see the discussion and clarify the conventions they've established. I might approach it slightly differently in Colonial America than Anglo Saxon England, and face different issues to solve.

2. The curators as a whole are working to establish "geni best practices" to make it very clear for everyone, and within the ***existing*** platform. Obviously we are all users ourselves so this conversation should be transparent.

3. Which brings me to the point: software development cycles can run into issues, and they have many priorities with limited resources to triage. It may "seem" easy enough, ask for a prefix field, we'll have it tomorrow, no worries. But I know from personal experience, not necessarily a fact without de-normalizing a database! So let's work with what geni has so very kindly provided for our use.

4. I use the "nickname" and "occupation" field all the time. To me they are the most handy / fastest / most visible way to list out all the AKA's (as known as) and titles.

So -- so far I think we all agree:

First Name
Middle Name
Last Name
Maiden Name for the birth name of women, repeated in the Last Name field of women who did not change it at a marriage event
Suffix for Sr., Jr., etc.
Display name as seems useful or needed, otherwise leave blank so will be populated with the geni default of First Name, Middle Name, Last Name

P.S.

I also have no worries that I can work with most everything anyone has done previously! I have an issue with a profile like this:

Alice
(no other info)

Marking as Master Profile makes the merges much easier, I think you will find, so that is my personal priority. :)

Erica

You mentioned the “curators” and "Master Profiles"

I have come acrorss 2 curators and they are NOT doing things correctly.

The first has created “Master Profiles” for a father and his son, and indoing so has neglected to see that the father was 3 years old when the son was born.

The second had been merging profiles but has not bothered to clean up the information in regards to the naming convention. They have left “De” as a middle name when the surname is “de ---“ or “d’---“

I am checking every merge notice I am sent in order to tidy-up on this.

Reg,

Anything *I* have done as a curator so far is one end, one goal:

Merge in the duplicates.

So your choice. I can sit there sourcing out and proofreading 1,000,000 profiles.

Or I can use the tools of mega merging to QUICKLY get the dups together, and rely on collaborators and managers to make the corrections needed.

Come play on the team and help! I can select the "best information available" in "resolve data conflicts" at the end of a merge, but more than that -- I'm not serving **you.**

Erica,

We may not be quite as on the same page as all that! When you say "Rev or Dr which really should be prefixes", there's a disconnect: neither of those are actually any part of a name (it takes a really smart parent to have a baby born with a doctorate!)

If one backs up a step, I think it's agreed that the reason people want to include professional and heraldic titles is that it eases identification; it helps pin down to which individual the entry refers. There is an additional issue of completeness, in that a heraldic title may actually be as much a legal name as his natal name, but generally a useful biographical entry would include this information ("Knighted at the age of 21, he went on to earn a PhD in cleverness and was made Bishop of Everywhere on his 25th birthday").

So the core reason for including titles in a Geni tree box is easy identification.

And I think that points inescapably to the use of Display Names *only* for this kind of data.

(If you see what I mean).

A suffix is not part of the legal name either, is it? A birth certificate doesn't say Erica Howton Jr. So it's the same principle - for identification / umm let's not say ego, and not a legal name.

And there you have it -- agreement again!