Tom, Please see below...
john. At 12:02 PM 4/19/2006, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
Good point as the term "Baby" can also be a given name - I have such an individual in my database - I also have a "Believe Me" given name. I have not seen a surname by the name of "Uknown" but I would certainly not rule it out - - people do stranger things. Anybody checking out those rather odd children names coming out of Hollywood? I am not comdemning this, just trying to show that one just never knows what name(s) any individual may end up with.
As I said earlier, I did not like the fictitious surname Unknown sorted in lists. I selected something that would sort apart from the known surnames.
Also, I believe someone discovered that "Unknown" was a valid surname in some other language. But do not quote me on that ;-).
I do not use Miss as it can be misleading, says very specifically that the individual had no previous marriages. I would suggest the term Ms. for females and Mr. for the male - do not spell out as the title Mister can also be construed as a given name. Of course Mrs.. can be used if marriage situation can be determined and Miss. if has been proven there were no previous marriages.
Hopefully, every young lady has a birth maiden name. And that maiden name is what you always want to be capturing. If I know that Mrs Mary Smith married Joe Jones, I will give he the name Mary [--?--] in the database and add a second marriage for her to a Mister Jones. (and usually go try to find out who Mister Jones was so I can give him his proper name and BMD info. And hopefully find his marriage record to Mary so I can find her correct maiden name. Not too long ago, I was searching through Massachusetts VRs to find a maiden name and had to go through 4 marriages before I found it.
I use Mister and Miss and spell them out so they do not look like a name prefix. I have a few cases of Rev. Mister Jones or Dr. Mister Smith. I suspect that those could be legitimate given names but I have not run into them. I have run into people with named Major. In fact I found a Major Steedman in England recently who was a Sergeant in the Worcestershire Militia.
I look at every name that is not complete as a signal for a research project.
Some one said earlier to use [--?--} for surnames and this is much better as it cannot lead to confusion - - any spelled out word can be misinterpreted as a surname (or given name), especially if the first letter is a cap. My experience has been that "accepted standards" for data entry are much better than trying to develope your own - in the end most will end up regretting and have a big chore changing over.
Tom, there is a lot of truth in what you say. The challenge is that in genealogy, the standards are mostly someone else's opinion. And sometimes they are setup to support their own projects. I believe someone mentioned that the LDS has some standards for naming to comply with various searching technologies. However, those standards do not work for me when my issue is preparing reports in Registry format or creating web sites.
As I said in my earlier message, for each of us, we need to understand how we want to use the data and adapt standards to get the results we want to achieve. You need a goal and then you can figure out how to achieve it.
john. Nashua, NH
Tom Montgomery
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