Preferred Name

[KirkS]

I'm sure this has been discussed before, but ...

How do you differentiate between a person's real name and what s/he is actually called. For example, I have Cyrus Jarvis Hooper, but he is known by Jarvis.

I use quotation marks for nicknames such as Charles Monroe "Ode" Cope.

[thomprod]

A nickname can be entered as a “fact” and will show up in the Family View and in Register Reports. I use the full legal name in the “first name” field and use the “nickname” field for the name they are/were known by.

[Blaise A. Darveaux]

I'm sure this has been discussed before, but ...

How do you differentiate between a person's real name and what s/he is actually called. For example, I have Cyrus Jarvis Hooper, but he is known by Jarvis.

I use quotation marks for nicknames such as Charles Monroe "Ode" Cope.

I do exactly the same as you for first names. My father's name Gerald Francis Darveaux always went by Jerry informally, even to owning a grocery store name Jerry's Jack & Jill. In my database I have him as Gerald "Jerry" Francis Darveaux.

A much more difficult problem is his last name. His birth certificate has Darveau (as does his 10 other siblings.) yet he used Darveaux all his life. For various reasons, his mother made him include the "x". But when he went to get married the second time in the 1980's, he could not get a marriage license because his birth certificate name was different from the name he went by. To get around that, he got his name formally changed to include the "x". For my database I am torn between using the name on his birth certificate (usually my rule) or the name that he used and passed on to me. Hint: I still haven't decided.

[Bob White]

Blaise: I have several similar situations where an official name change took place. On those records, I put the current name in the name fields and the former name in the Alias field and explain the situation in the Notes section. As for usual names, I do the same as you.

[KirkS]

Gerald "Jerry" Francis Darveaux

I like that solution a lot, but the quotes don't make as much sense when the middle name is the preferred name -- in my example that would give me, Cyrus Jarvis "Jarvis" Hooper.

So, I edited the AKA Fact to Preferred Name and made that fact visible in the person card:

pref-name-card.jpg

And I also added the PREF fact to the children window in the family view:

children-panel.jpg

I appreciate this community, especially you active members. You help us all and keep things going.

Kirk

[A Hougie]

I use brackets around the unused name, so "(Cyrus) Jarvis Cooper"

[KirkS]

I use brackets around the unused name, so "(Cyrus) Jarvis Cooper"

But if you shared that with others who were less familiar with the family, they would not know what the parentheses mean. Or they might think you were implying that Cyrus is the preferred name.

[Blaise A. Darveaux]

This brings up a wider issue of the use of what I call "designating marks". Every researcher "should?" decide what different marks mean in their own research. I wish some of these were standardized, but I don't think they are. Parentheses are often used in obituaries to designate maiden names.

For example: I use parentheses in the name only for designating a maiden name. This is rare for me. I almost always use maiden (or birth) names, even in the modern era. In the old French Canadian culture (and perhaps others), women never took the husbands surname. She retained her birth name throughout her life. There was no such thing as a "married" name or a "maiden" name.

I use double quotes " " for nick names and, sometimes, Anglicized versions of names.

I use curvy brackets { } for excluding sensitive data

I use straight brackets [ ] for comments of the researcher that are not data in the source

There are also Large single chevron < > , small single chevron ‹ › , small double chevron « » , and single quotes ' ' that can be used for other things.

It is important to mention, whatever you decide to use for whatever purpose, make sure you check out its behaviors when searching, sorting, gedcom, etc. before committing a LOT of data to that method.