Confused about prefixes

Question

Hi,

I'm a little confused about the rules about the Last Name at Birth for European Aristocrats:

The rules in https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Project:European_Royals_and_Aristocrats#Last_Name_at_Birth

state: "PREFIXES IN LAST NAME AT BIRTH FIELD: in cases like de Quincy, prefixes go with the surname in the Current Last Name field, EXCEPT when they are the last name at birth (LNAB) like St John. ..."

The common "de" before a surname does NOT go in the LNAB field; it goes with the surname in the Current Last Name field while the surname, ONE word, goes in the LNAB. Example: Last name at birth: "Villefort", Current Last Name: "de Villefort". The exception to this is de Vere. Members of this family should have both words in the LNAB field."

For German aristocrats the prefix "von" (German version of "de" or "of") is considered a proper part of the last name. (there's no "Preußen" only a "von Preußen")

The rules mentioned above leave me puzzled. Is the German "von" an exception like "de Vere"? Then this would be consistent with German last names tradition and the sources.

If "von" is not an exception, then the names in WikiTree would be inconsistent with the sources.

How do I interpret the rules correctly?

Comments

The link for the naming standards is actually this one:  https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Help:Name_Fields_for_European_Aristocrats

Answer 1

Hi Ronnie,

These naming standards were set up before I joined Wikitree and became one of the European Aristocrats project leaders.  My understanding as to the reasoning behind omitting the 'de' in the LNAB fields (for most all except the de Vere family) is that these families eventually dropped the 'de' (ie the de Alfreton family eventually just became Alfreton; the de Arderne's became Arderne's).  Since the LNAB is a search field, and sometimes people would enter a name with the 'de' and others would enter it without the 'de', it was determined to leave off the 'de' from the LNAB field but include it in the CLN field when applicable.

In the case of 'von', since there's no "Preußen" only a "von Preußen", I would include the 'von' in the LNAB field.

When the naming standards were written, they were geared towards the British Isles profiles (primarily England).  Now with projects such as the Cymru Welsh Royals and Aristocrats project and the German Roots project, they have their own naming standards.  As such, it seems we need to edit the EuroAristo naming standards to indicate that people should check with those projects as to the preferred use of the various fields.  Cymru has their guidelines here, but I don't see a page for the German Roots project.

Darlene - Co-Leader, European Aristocrats Project

Edited to add:  I've updated the EuroAristo naming standards page to mention that other projects may have different standards.

Comments

I've been confused about de la Mare (another family that did not drop the prefixes) and would like to correct some of my attempts at this name (running the words together, for example, as they are often printed). But what is the best option?

And should we keep all the Saint names as two words? Saint Loe/Lowe Saint John, etc. Or is St. preferred? Maybe some of these names could be added to the naming standards as they are confusing.

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With regard to 'Saint' names, the LNAB is supposed to be St (no period) and the surname, i.e. St Lo, St John.  This is mentioned in the 'prefixes in LNAB field' and the 'punctuation' lines of the EuroAristo naming standards.  And yes, they are two words.

As to de la Mare (thanks for bringing it up!), it should be de la Mare, exactly as you wrote it -- lower case for the de la, upper case for the surname.  I'll add that to the naming standards.

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Thank you, Darlene 

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Hello Darlene,

could we make the guide line a little clearer. Especially the descirption under https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Help:Name_Fields_for_European_Aristocrats says the total opposite. 

My suggestion: Topmost rule: if the prefix is a proper part of the LNAB (e.g. was baptised with that name), that the prefix belongs to into the LNAB field. If it is not part of the LNAB (like "Leonardo da Vinci" i.e. Lenard from the village Vinci) the full name with the prefix goes into the Current Last Name field.

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I think it needs to be pointed out that these naming standards are intended primarily for medieval and earlier profiles.  As such, we have no baptismal record for them, and in the earlier periods they didn't even actually have a surname.  That is why these standards vary from the general Wikitree naming guidelines.  For these earlier profiles, you need to think of the LNAB solely as a reference/search field.  Basically, it's like the card catalog in a library.  Due to the limitations of the search engine, we need consistency to avoid the creation of duplicates.  What happened in the past (and unfortunately continues to this day) is that someone will start creating a new profile.  Let's say I decide to add John de Aubigney.  If I put 'de Aubigney' in the LNAB, then it won't locate the pre-existing profile for John that has the LNAB as 'Aubigney'.  Additionally, in some records, he is John d'Aubigney.  So if someone else decided to use "d'Aubigney" in the LNAB field, we conceivably would have three of the same profile.  Thus the EuroAristo group decided a number of years ago to drop the prefix in the LNAB.

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Ronnie, I don't understand what you are referring to that is 'saying the total opposite'...

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Hello Darlene,

https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Help:Name_Fields_for_European_Aristocrats says "* The common ‘de’, ‘du’, ‘le’, ‘la’, ‘de la’, ‘von’, ‘van’ before a surname does not go in the LNAB field; it goes with the surname in the Current Last Name field while the surname, ONE word, goes in the LNAB." etc.

Btw: could we please have one guideline, i.e. merge 

https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Help:Name_Fields_for_European_Aristocrats 

with

https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Project:European_Royals_and_Aristocrats#Last_Name_at_Birth.

About the work that goes with it, if you need help of any kind I'm glad to lend a hand.

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It is correct that -- as a general rule (there are exceptions) -- the prefix does not go in the LNAB field.  It belongs in the CLN field.  If you look at Friedrich Von Büren, you'll see that his LNAB is Büren and CLN is von Büren.

There is only the one guideline; it's just shown on two pages.  Unless there is an error on one of them, they basically say the same thing..  We prefer to have it in more than one place in case someone doesn't notice a link.

I haven't seen a page for naming guidelines for the German Roots project.  If they have one or want to create their own set of naming standards, we can link to that page from the EuroAristo page.  You may want to drop a note to one of their project leaders and reference this discussion.  As I mentioned above, the EuroAristo guidelines when written were geared towards the British.

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There was a discussion on G2G perhaps a few years ago now that may not have been reflected in the EuroAristo naming standards, but that came to the agreement that names for EuroAristo profiles after 1600 could have the LNAB with 'von' or any of the other prepositions.

I think the reason why it wasn't suggested in earlier profiles is that you don't find it being used consistently in documents of that period.  Maybe because they were still mostly in Latin?

Answer 2

The way I read it 'von' always stays with the big surname

so you would have 
Last name at birth: "Villefort", Current Last Name: "de Villefort".

but

Last name at birth: 'von Glasenapp'

There are no exception for 'von' names, because nothing is done differently.  'von' stays with the big surname - no exceptions needed.

Answer 3

This is a matter which has given me some considerable concern for some time in relation to Scottish surnames and by extension English surnames. I have always considered that the original guidance was just plain wrong! Because a family changed the way they wrote their surname two centuries later should have no impact on how earlier members are recorded.

For example in my own family, our original surname was "de Moravia" not  Moravia and therefore the surname should be de Moravia, not Moravia. We didn't drop the "de" in the late 13th century. We changed the entire surname to "Sutherland". Some of our cousins also changed their use of the name completely to "Murray". In essence the point I am making is the surname (LNAB on wikitree) should appear as it was, not as it is convenient to show it and the current surname is exactly the same as the surname at birth.

Comments

Mark I'm not necessarily against this change or against your post but I am going to point out that  there are some discrepancies with using 'de Moravia' or other similar names as the surname.

One the name originally comes from documents written in latin and we don't usually use latin names (though perhaps we should?)

That even de Moravia, is not always how it appears in documents see this one where it is 'Wilielmus de Morauia'

That overall we seem to accept first names in their modern form - William, but not Last Names at Birth?

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U and V were the same letter, so citing that as an example only makes it different to modern eyes.

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Thanks Melanie, my point still holds that by using de Moravia, we are still spelling the name in a way that is acceptable to us, not necessarily as it would have been recognised then.

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Having just gone "blind" from trying to decipher an ancient gravestone AND some writing from an old family Bible .. I could wish they wrote in a way that was easier on my modern eyes! Those long s's (I forget the actual term for those) when the letter is doubled are often worse than VV for W, or I and J being the same letter.

I don't think I have any Latin names to figure out, but I think if we were to send back in time the name "Moravia", it would be understood as much as Morauia would be, because the U and the V were the same letter.  There weren't two separate letters as we have.  So if I wrote ouen, it would be understood as oven.

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Slightly "off topic" but I don't know whether either you John or Melanie have ever tried one of these "clever" exercises in which a paragraph has been written in bad English with lots of miss-spellings and punctuation mistakes. I have done and found that I read it correctly with ease.

John the point you raise is similar to the debate over the surname of married women in Scotland, namely that we have very little evidence as to how people actually referred to themselves. There has always been an assumption that married women continued to be known by their maiden names but actually the majority of the thinking behind that is predicated on the fact that that was how the Church chose to refer to them and almost all records about most women are church records.

I no longer read, write and speak Latin fluently as I could do 40 years ago when I had recently ceased to be a Latin scholar at school but still have a reasonable command of it. When reading early Sutherland titles (and we do have among the earliest, dating back to the mid-1100s) the early earls are referred to as "de Moravia" as are other family members who act as witnesses to other charters. However by the early 14th century when people like me take the view that the family had universally dropped the "de Moravia" in favour of "Sutherland" it is rare to see family members referred to as "di Sutherlandii" or similar. Around the same time other Norman families seem to have dropped the "de" so for example the "de la Hayes" simply become the "Hays".

Without the benefits of time travel we really cannot know the answer but as a 21st century descendant, I personally feel rather insulted that my ancestral name of de Moravia should be emasculated. After all the reason we adopted "de Moravia" was because much of Moravia had been our reward for kicking eight bells out of the opponents of David I at his request :)

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John the point you raise is similar to the debate over the surname of married women in Scotland, namely that we have very little evidence as to how people actually referred to themselves. There has always been an assumption that married women continued to be known by their maiden names but actually the majority of the thinking behind that is predicated on the fact that that was how the Church chose to refer to them and almost all records about most women are church records.
commented by Mark Sutherland-Fisher

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I have a gravestone and a family Bible that shows the wife kept her own name, even her husband referred to her by her birth name.  (Scotland, mid to late 1700s.) 

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Melanie you confirm my point precisely. The gravestone was in a churchyard and it would not have been the widower and certainly wasn't the wife who engraved it. The entry in the family bible would have been written by someone much later. Matters in relation to religion were done according to the dictats of the church. In many Parishes the mothers of children are not even mentioned in baptism entries because as far as the church was concerned, it was the father who determined whether a child was legitimate or not and that was all the church cared about. I have lots of letters to married women dating from the 1600s and 1700s and they are all addressed to Mistress X  or Madame X where X was her married name. There is little evidence of what the women actually called themselves, not how someone else, usually the church, referred to them.

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As the husband outlived his wife by 9 years and the entry in the family Bible was written by him "my spouse forename lastname (her birth name)", I'd respectfully say you're not exactly 100% correct on this. :)

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Oh, and so you know, I'm actually on your side regards those last names.  If a family was de-whatever, then they're often exactly that.

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I have multiple examples of where a Scottish married woman sometimes shows up with her maiden name and sometimes with her married name.  I think it didn't really matter to them.  Most of the time these were small communities and everyone knew each other.  

It is in our modern world that this distinction has taken on meaning.

My guess is if they had two or three people with the same name they would switch to the other name to make a distinction between two people with the same name.  And having same names in the community was a fairly common thing as names would come down from grandparents to children and then to grandchildren so it was very probable you had cousins being named for the same grandparent.  

We need to stop thinking about names like we use them.  Go to any small farming community today and you still hear intermixing of family names when people talk about someone.  Something like, Mary Douglas wife of William Robertson could be referred to as Mary Douglas, as Mary Robertson, or as Mary Douglas Robertson.  Which version is used can depend on the topic of conversation.  When talking about her in relation to her birth family often Douglas is used.  When talking about her in relation to her children or husband normally Robertson is used.  When making a distinction among various women in the community with the same name all 3 names would be used.  

I have to believe our ancestors would have done something along similar lines.  For this reason I enter in WT the maiden name as LNAB and the husband's surname as current / married name.

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I actually find it fascinating.  In my English line I have none of this.  In my Scottish family, some of it.  (It was most definitely "Anglicised" after they emigrated to Australia, although I think one daughter sort of "fought back" as she adopted her maiden name as an extra forename.)

I know this is diverting away from the last-name prefix issue, but I just have to share the one page from that family bible I was trying to read:

There is a certification to all whom it may concern that the one son (occupation) of (place) married the lawful daughter of (name) deceased (occupation) of (place).

There is listed thereafter the children of that couple:

(name) their daughter born (place) (date).

(name) their daughter born (place) (date).

(name) their daughter born (place) (6th April 1762) and departed this life at the pleasure of the Almighty God by the smallpox ye 25th January 1765.

(name) their son born (place) (date).

(name) their daughter born (place) (20th October 1765) and departed this life at the pleasure of the Almighty God ye 19th December 1765 (cannot read the cause .. I'm still working on that)

(name) their son born (place) (date)

(name) their daughter departed this life at the pleasure of the Almighty God at (place) (date) by a (word) fever and sore throat

(name) their son born (place) (date)

(name last-name) and (name maiden surname) his spouse removed from (place) their family to (place) ye 17th February 17??

A change in handwriting now:

(first name) (maiden surname) my spouse departed this life at the pleasure of God (date 1793) by throwing up of blood being suddenly (word).

(first name) (maiden surname) my mother in law dayed at (place) ye (date 1794) aged 90 years.

(name last-name) my son departed this life at Kingstown, Jamaica, the (date 1797) by the Yellow Fever.

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I found it rather sad that his very first entry in the family Bible (no idea just WHEN it passed to him) was to note his wife's death; then her mother's death, then that of his eldest son.