5 replies to this topic

[SusieZada]

I always enter females with the Maiden Surname - the correct way to identify females throughout their life.  There are occasions, particularly with large trees where their maiden name doesn't instantly spring to mind - you may have their Given Name and Married Name but not be sure of their husband's name.  This is even more of a problem when you are helping other people with their tree and of course the family relationships aren't that familiar to you.

 

I wish it was as easy to find females in the default Index list as it is to find males.  i.e. sort order SURNAME, Given Names, Birth year

 

There are two ways this could easily be achieved in RootsMagic:

 

1. Show female's married names in this list as well as their maiden names - similar to AKAs / Alternate names OR
2. Split Surnames and Given Names so the list can be sorted by Given name (not as ideal as Option 1)

I know there are many other ways of finding these females and I generally select SEARCH / NAMEFIND but why should I have to use these extra steps when I don't have to do that to find Males?

 

With a large database there could be many females with the Given Name of Mary - but if you could see the Given Name in conjunction with their Married Surname it would be so much easier to select the right person.

[TomH]

Something like this has been a wish of long-standing. See http://sqlitetoolsfo...s - Add Married

[Jerry Bryan]

As Tom already said, this is a long standing wish.  I think there are really two different things that users are wishing for.

• Ease of finding women by their married name in the index. NameFind works but it isn't really adequate because the married name doesn't show in the index and because NameFind is so slow for a large database.
• Identifying women by their married names in reports (e.g., Mary Smith married first William Jones and then later in the same report Mary Jones died or Mary Jones married second Andrew Wilson.

Jerry

[Don Newcomb]

I guess if I ran into this issue more than once or twice a century, I'd use Name Find to search for the woman by her married name then add her married name as an Alternate Name and never worry about it again. As it is, I've just come to think of women by their maiden names and am often somewhat perplexed by the lengths some people go to in order to make sure you see her married name(s). I'm surprised that I actually have have not seen a woman named "Mrs. Joe Dokes" on Ancestry.com.  

[zhangrau]

I have solved this problem by using multiple Alternate Name facts for every individual. Any variation of given, middle, surname, initials, etc. gets a separate Alternate Name fact. I also created two Alternate name separator fact types to precede and follow the lists of Alternate Names (which are sequenced using the Sort Order field).

 

Here's some linked images to show how I accomplish this. As always, this is just ONE way of doing this - some researchers seem to dislike the use of multiple Alternate Name facts for a person, For me, the advantage is to solve the issue that the original poster on this thread asked about: "How do I facilitate finding a woman by her maiden name, or by any of her various married names?"  Don't forget to go to the Sidebar Options, and enable [X] Show alternate names.

 

You should note that all of my Alternate Name and separator fact types start with a blank line. This forces each to a new line in the Narrative Report.

 

At the end of this post I show how this looks for a person with multiple citations. I like the way that placing each Alternate Name on its own line makes it easy to see which citations used which version of the person's name.

 

 

 

 

 

 

[Vyger]

Like zhangrau I also achieved this through Alternate Name > Married and thankfully can achieve this outside Rootsmagic, I also use Alternate Name > Other Spelling for variations like Smith and Smyth or more directly in my tree Smylie, Smyley, Smiley as family surname spellings often evolve over time making the fragmentation difficult in the Index Pane.

 

I believe Rootsmagic should consider an inboard utility to create these Alternate Names both Married (which there may be many) and other variations to overcome this long standing issue and improve reporting options of whether to include these in reporting or not.

 

Whilst slightly off subject I notice in the above report "[Unknown]", I am not saying it is wrong but sadly many users enter many such personal prefered codes where a name is unknown like 5 underscores. It seems this is almost always to aid the readability of reports like the example above. I have made the point before that if Rootsmagic simply provided the option to INSERT the users preferred placeholder where a Name or Place is blank this would go a long way to cleaning up Names especially. As I said I believe these entries are usually used to help the readability of reports and provide little within the database a blank entry does not.