Question

When maiden name and married name are the same, why doesn't profile page reflect maiden name in parenthesis?

Answer 1

Current Last Name equals Last Name at Birth for unmarried people by default.  When the two fields match, WT doesn't use the (LNAB) in the name display, married or not.

Answer 2

As I understand it, the data system here can only tell whether the LNAB and Current Last Name are the same (in which case no parentheses are used) or different (in which case parentheses are used). There is no mechanism that determine whether a person who has the same name in both fields is (1) a person who used the same last name throughout their life (the more common situation) or (2) the unusual situation of a woman who married a man with the same last name. I imagine that it would take a lot of reprogramming to get the system to perform the trick you are asking for.

Comments

Yes, it happens to me when cousins marry cousins.  Just one of thos limitations.

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It wouldn't take a lot of reprogramming if a radio button is added to show/hide LNAB in the displayed name.  It would be nice to have such a radio button for all the name fields so that we could custom control display of names on the title of profile view pages.  How often has it happened that you would like to suppress the middle name, which was never used by the person but is recorded in his/her profile data?

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Ros, I have several of those, too. Just came across one yesterday, a Hipp marries a first cousin, also a Hipp. My preference would be to see the maiden in ().

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But if the "Current Last Name" is the same as the "Last Name at Birth", you just leave the Current field blank, no? That is, the only time it makes any sense to fill both out with the same name is if a woman's maiden and married names happen to be the same, and WT ought to display both.

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That's brilliant, Gaile! Clever of you to perceive that this is a data-DISPLAY issue, not necessarily a DATA issue. I think it should be a button that would force display of both LNAB and Current Last Name, even though they are the same.

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@J Palotay
Example: Mary Ann Edgcombe marries George Edgcombe (they were cousins).  She is displayed as Mary Ann Edgcombe, not Mary Ann (Edgcombe) Edgcombe.

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Ros, yes, that's what it currently does, as Ellen points out. But it doesn't make sense to me: if a person's name didn't change, then why would anyone bother to fill out the Current Last Name field? In other words, WT ought to display both, regardless of whether they're the same or not, because the only time it makes sense to fill out both is if there are two different families in play.

_Do_ people fill out the "Current Last Name" field for people whose name never changed? If yes, why? What possible purpose can it serve?

If people usually leave that field blank for unchanged names, then why does WT supress it? What possible purpose can that serve?

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J, the CLN field is ALWAYS filled in.  By default, it matches the LNAB.  If you try to leave it blank, it will automatically fill in Anonymous when you save the record.  Please don't ask me what I think of that, though!!!

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J, a hypothetical situation. A female LNAB of Beaty marries a male LNAB Beatty. So the name is the same, just a variant spelling, but still the same name. And, just because of a variant spelling, she gets Beaty Beatty. So, the inky controlling factor is spelling, not a different name.

I’d still like to opt for the maiden and CLN, just to show what both were, even if the spelling were exactly the same.

Like I said, just a hypothetical situation.

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Re: automatically-filled CLN -- oh, yeah, I'd forgotten about that annoyance. I guess I've somehow managed to learn to completely ignore it.

(I don't use married names in genealogy, especially not on Anglo-centric WT, which is completely incapable of displaying a Hungarian married name correctly. Therefore, I mostly just ignore the nuances of LNAB, CLN, and all the other badly-labeled name fields, and the accompanying bewildering array of display formats.)

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Pip, yes, that's what I've been saying: the display should include both names, regardless of whether they're the same or not. However, if WT autopopulates the CLN field for people whose names never changed, then there needs to be some way to tell the system whether to display both. Personally, I think CLN should not autopopulate -- i.e., if a person's name didn't change, then CLN should be blank.

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J, I didn’t have this problem in my FTM database. I used only maiden names! Had to learn a whole new system when I joined WT, and I had to be reminded of it... just once.