Birth Surname, Last Name -- misunderstanding?

Started by Private User on Friday, September 6, 2019

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Private User

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Private

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Erica Howton

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Private User

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Sir Elton John

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book:Joan_Jett#/media/File:Joan_Jett_2013.jpg

Joan Jett

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Private User

9/6/2019 at 10:14 AM

For Joan Jett, at one point Birth Surname was blank, and instead the Curator for it had created and used a Field called "Birth Surname That Does Not Imply She Changed it Due to Marriage" for Larkin
-- now the Profile uses the Birth Surname Field for Larkin, but there is a Curator's Note stating:
"Joan Jett's surname differs from her birth surname but the change is not due to marrying someone with the surname Jett. I.e. Larkin is not a maiden name but a non maidenic birth surname."

Geni has the Field "Birth Surname" for the Birth Surname, ie the Last Name they had at Birth -- it has the "Last Name" Field for the Last Name the person went by -- Geni very purposely chose to have a Birth Surname Field and a Last Name Field, not a Maiden Name Field and a Married Name Field. They chose to do this because Geni understood there were many reasons why a Last Name might be changed.

I can see including information in a Person's Overview Section telling us that, after a divorce, the person chose to use their mother's Maiden Name, or that at some point the person chose to legally change their name, or etc.
There might possibly be a reason to include such information in a Curator's Note.
But -
A Curator's note just to tell us the Last Name being different from the Birth Surname was not due to Marriage, and to say that the name in the Birth Surname Field "is not a maiden name but a non maidenic birth surname." seems to me to suggest the Curator still does not understand the meaning and use of Geni's Birth Surname Field and its relationship to the Last Name Field.

Private

9/6/2019 at 2:34 PM

Well next time you figure out how to connect a famous person to the world family tree and you can write whatever you want. Biographical info on a notable person is peanuts - the chiddush of Geni is that anyone can figure out how she is related to any notable person on earth.

Erica Howton C

9/6/2019 at 11:28 PM

Jonathan - we do aim for naming consistency in the American English language tree, whether notable or not.

You, me, Lois and many others have in our own trees men who changed their names between the event Birth and the event Death; and we have tremendous amount of spelling variations as well, in an ideal world we’d be able to capture all of those changes in a name tab and attach to timeline events. But there’s only so much space in a profile.

I don’t want to know in a curator note or a special attribute field that someone changed their name - for a celebrity that’s almost a given, and why we have Display Name for “best known as.” I want to know why they’re notable.

Joan Jett is a role model for a couple of generations of women now. You’re not a girl, and she’s not your generation, so you may not get why it was so important when she picked up that guitar. And yes, I want to know what her parents thought about it, and where they came from (her tree), and how we connect. But her “name” is no more important than, say, Elton John’s, and he doesn’t get a note dedicated to explaining it.

Erica Howton C

9/6/2019 at 11:38 PM

British which is close but not exactly the same as American English:

Sir Elton John

Private

9/11/2019 at 6:58 PM

If her name is Joan Jett (Larkin) 99 out of 100 people would think her father had surname Larkin and she married some dude with last name Jett.

Private User

9/11/2019 at 8:21 PM

These notes seem needlessly technical and complicated. Would it not be simplest to just have a quick line saying that Jett is a stage name and leave it at that? (If, as Erica notes, anything needs to be said at all.)

I only make notes about names if there's evidence that people are commonly confused. I can't imagine that anyone's looking at Joan Jett's profile and leaving confused about her surname at birth. It's obvious that she was born a Larkin and adopted Jett. The note seems to be complicating something straightforward.

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Birth Surname, Last Name -- misunderstanding?

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