When the last name isn't the last name

Question

I did a search on this subject before posting, because I'm sure the subject has arisen before, but when I was adding an unconnected branch to the list on the Connectors Chat page, I realised that we have a problem with the handling of Chinese names. The particular profile I was adding was for Ng Geok Kim, and the profile ID is Geok_Kim-1, but actually, Geok Kim is her personal name, and Ng is her family name. 

Now, on WikiTree, we talk about first names and last names, but there's kind of an unspoken assumption that the last name is the family name, because that's the way it works in English, but there are a bunch of cultures where it doesn't work that way. 

In Chinese, the first name is the family name, and the last two parts are the personal name. Thus for Mao Zedong (or Mao Tse Tung, depending on your age), Mao was his family name, and Zedong/Tse Tung was his personal name. So calling him "Chairman Mao" was akin to referring to "President Lincoln".

(I don't see Mao on WikiTree, but I think I found his father, who has his personal name in the "First Name" field, and his family name in the ""Last Name" field. That is one way of dealing with the issue, and keeping the family names listed correctly, although it does mean that names are displayed out of order.)

I would like to suggest that we change the title of the "First Name" and "Last Name" fields to "Personal Name" and "Family Name", and add a tickbox saying something like "Display family name first", so that on profiles, lists, etc., the family name gets listed first for those profiles where that box is ticked. (Chinese names for sure, and there may be other cultures/languages which list the family name first.)

There are a couple of other cases where the last name isn't a family name:

In Sweden, the last name is a patronymic. So Anna Andersdotter's father's last name isn't Andersdotter. In fact, even her brothers' last names aren't Andersdotter. Her father's first name is Anders, and she is, quite literally Anders' "dotter" (daughter), and her brothers are Anders' sons, so their last names are Andersson, and Anders' last name is actually Andreasson.

Among the Amharic people of Ethiopia (and at least some nearby cultures), the first name is the personal name, and the last name is the father's personal name. Thus, in Emperor Haile Selassie's first name at birth (Tafari Makkonen), Tafari was his personal name, and Makkonen was his father's personal name.

In those two cases, I don't see any point in making any more changes to the fields than I've already suggested, although I do wonder if a "Last name is a patronymic" tickbox might be useful as a "heads up" for people unfamiliar with those situations who are looking to go back another generation. In each case, they'd already have the father's personal name (but not his patronymic).

There's one other situation that I know of where names work differently than they do in English. In Russian, it's the middle name that's a patronymic. Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev was the son of Sergey Andreyevich Gorbachev, who was, in turn, the son of Andrey Moiseyevich Gorbachev. So if you know a Russian's middle name, you also know his father's first name.

(There may be cultures which use matronymic names, but I can't think of one offhand.)

Comments

Thanks for bringing this up again! Unfortunately there is a long list of previous G2G discussions about personal names and family names in all variations, without much results so far. Constant dripping wears away the stone (hopefully)...

Answer 1

Thanks for bringing up the Swedish example :-)

A couple of us are busy as Data Doctors trying to correct the hundreds of LNABs for women who are named as -sson when they should have been -dotter. Most of these errors are due to old gedcom imports - but a few new ones are also discovered with each run of the errror checker.

The Russian situation also occurs in Sweden, in families where there IS an inheritable family name, like many of the smith families in the old iron production crafts. As adults these people ar often known now by their patronymic, now by their family name and sometimes by both together (I think the same goes for the Russians).

Metronymics were used in some parts of Sweden in the 19th century for the children of unwed mothers. I ferreted out one recently, just to use as an example. https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Annasson-2 I have also seen it stated as a medieval practice when the mother was from a more famous family than the father - but I have yet to find an example.

Comments

Hi, I know this is an older thread, but I found my way to it and remembered an ancestor who used her mothers last name,  This is in the medieval aristocracy category.  

Sancha de Ayala, a research note on her profile says surnames were relatively newer among the Castilian aristocracy and custom permitted assumption of a surname from either ones mother or father.  Ayala was used as her mothers family was more distinguished then her fathers.  

https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Ayala-45