I'm sure this is a common situation. Is there a best practice method to show a changed name on a family group sheet or  pedigree chart? For example, my gr-grandfather was born in Sweden as Albin Petersson. Later in Wisconsin, he legally changed his name to Alvin Williams. How does one best show an Americanized given name? What is the best way to show a changed surname? Is Albin/Alvin Petersson/Williams too awkward? Thanks for your help with this! Elizabeth Gomoll St Paul MN

Elizabeth, I have the same situation with ancestors coming from Sweden and from Germany, whose used different names once here. On my family group sheets, I show their name as shown on baptism or birth records. If the name was changed legally, that would be shown as an "event." The children of said ancestor, if born in the US, would show the new surname. If the name was not changed legally, then I would show the name change in the person's notes. When writing up a narrative about the ancestor's life, I would discuss how the name changed once he was in the U.S. Lisa Gorrell On Sat, Jan 26, 2013 at 5:58 PM, Elizabeth Gomoll <ewgomoll@yahoo.com>wrote: > I'm sure this is a common situation. Is there a best practice method to > show a changed name on a family group sheet or pedigree chart? For > example, my gr-grandfather was born in Sweden as Albin Petersson. Later in > Wisconsin, he legally changed his name to Alvin Williams. How does one best > show an Americanized given name? What is the best way to show a changed > surname? Is Albin/Alvin Petersson/Williams too awkward? > > > Thanks for your help with this! > > Elizabeth Gomoll > St Paul MN > The Transitional Genealogists List was created to provide a supportive > environment for genealogists to learn best practices as they transition to > professional level work. Please respect the kind intentions of this list. > ------------------------------- > To unsubscribe from the list, please send an email to > TRANSITIONAL-GENEALOGISTS-FORUM-request@rootsweb.com with the word > 'unsubscribe' without the quotes in the subject and the body of the message >

Elizabeth: Many software packages have only one field for the whole name of a person. Nowadays if we're submitting information to genealogical or genetic genealogy databases by GEDCOM, we need to remember that the slash before and after a name tells GEDCOM that it is the surname. We are stuck with this poor GEDCOM design for a while longer. You would do better with something like: Albin Petersson AKA Alvin Williams Albin Petersson also known as Alvin Williams Which of these do you consider his primary name? That is, did he immigrate as a child, a young adult, or an old man? Which name did he use for the majority of his life? I have this situation with my father (2 Norwegian versions of his name plus 2 American versions of his name). However, he spent most of his adult life under the 2nd American version. Thus I make it his primary name. Some software has better capability than others for handling this situation. The Master Genealogist (TMG) permits an unlimited number of AKA names, which is very useful for my grandparents. Each sentence in a narrative in TMG (except the birth sentence) can have a different version of the person's name in it, generated by the software. I have also set up primary names in TMG for the grandparents which are a chronological concatenation of about a dozen different pieces of their names, mostly farm name changes due to moving from farm to farm. In lectures I suggest keeping track of Swedish and other Scandinavian farm names in the Other Name field in TMG, in order to keep straight all the guys named Ole Olsson/Olsen, etc. I have seen this done in printed genealogical writeups from Sweden and Iceland. In order to print the Other Name field in TMG, I have set up an All Fields Print Name Style. TMG allows one to set up custom name styles. For example, a Patronymic Name Style, a Military Name Style, a Clergy Name Style (for clergy who Latinized or Hellenized their names). Did Albin/Alvin have a Swedish military name? Those often became American surnames, but they are well worth keeping track of as an AKA or in the Other Name field in TMG, even if the military name didn't get used in the US. If your genealogical software allows you to edit pedigree charts and family group sheets in word processing after generating them in the genealogical software, you can touch up things that don't look quite right. TMG allows this. It's easy to see how Albin became Alvin (common consonant sound substitution). However, was his father or paternal grandfather an Olsson? Among the Norwegian immigrants William was a common substitution for the given name Ole in the US. Is something similar at work in the case of Olsson -> Williams, which is an English patronymic? Non-English-speaking immigrants often would substitute any vowel sound for another vowel sound or H at the beginning of a name to Americanize it. W is after all a double-U. Hope this helps. --Ida Skarson McCormick, idamc@seanet.com, Seattle ----------------------- Elizabeth Gomoll wrote on January 26, 2013: > I'm sure this is a common situation. Is there a best practice method to > show a changed name on a family group sheet or  pedigree chart? For > example, my gr-grandfather was born in Sweden as Albin Petersson. Later in > Wisconsin, he legally changed his name to Alvin Williams. How does one > best show an Americanized given name? What is the best way to show a > changed surname? Is Albin/Alvin Petersson/Williams too awkward? <snip>