Consensus on forenames and surnames?

Question

<newbie>

Ballantine, Ballantyne is used (by registrants) on the same people on various documents on the same person for 270 years.  I also have people that have eg George (Ballantine) as the forename on the birth registration but every other document including death has "George Barr" (Ballantyne) as the forename.  FamilySearch Org apparently has no provision for AKAs (also know as) and leaves the file title up to the researchers to hack as they see fit - its a real problem with merges and fragmented trees.  I have no problem selecting "my convention" but would like to know how others handle this situation.

Comments

From https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Help:Name_Fields ...

The Proper First Name and Last Name at Birth fields should be the names they were born with, in their native language.

Does that help?

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FamilySearch.org profiles have a section for Other Information; you can add alternate names in this section. I use this section all the time for spelling variations.

I added 2 surname variations to George's FamilySearch.org profile, in case you want to see how it's done.

https://www.familysearch.org/tree/person/details/M5QL-LNH

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Because there are so many fragments of Ballantine Trees on the web, editing & merging makes sense.  I am a rookie here and will be (shortly) putting my tree up - after that, it will be about merging & cleaning up the tree (I do have the ScotlandPeople scans in most cases).  Altering someone else's prose is fraught with antagonism so I wanted to be sure to get the conventions correct at the get go.  Thanks for your assistance.

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Comprehensive answer page - just what I was looking for.  Strangely enough, its "my convention" too <smile>.

Answer 1

Hi Andrew!  Welcome to WikiTree!  I think most of what you are wondering has been covered by Help topic here: https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Help:Name_Fields

I especially like the guideline to explain it all in the bio!

Cheers

Shirlea