I am another person who was at first taken aback by Wikitree's non-traditional use of women's married names. I have since come around to Wikitree's way of thinking.
Internet genealogy and paper genealogy are different animals because of differences in the mediums. There is no question that a woman's surname at birth is the most important if you care about her ancestors. How would you find them without it?
But hypertext (i.e., the internet), makes it possible to find her under either name. And some researchers may have found her only as a married woman, and have nothing else to search. Whereas another research may have seen only her name as a child. Wikitree's way allows her to be found either way.
But here is my problem and my question; I have seen many cases in which a woman was married multiple times and has several married surnames. In some cases, she was the mother of many children by an earlier marriage, and none by a later one. In that case (which I've seen several times) the earlier married name is of more genealogical value than her name at death. In the same spirit as the support for the Wikitree convention I explained above, having all of a woman's married names searchable would be the ideal solution. That way, she would show up on searches for her name as it was in any snapshot of time; in other words, any record a researcher comes upon.
Can we get a searchable way to enter all of a woman's married names, along with her birth name?
