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What's the correct way to show a surname change?

Karen Beth Drexler

June 02, 2011 22:08

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If a family used one name in their country of origin, but then changed it when they immigrated, what's the best way to show that on Geni, & get tree matches for both names? As in:

 

In Poland, a family name was Feldon. But once they immigrated to America, they changed their surname to Feldman. However, some kept the name Feldon. So, I want to see tree matches for both names.

 

So, do I just write the original surname in parenthesis after the name they used in America? Will the Geni system know to look for both Feldman & Feldon tree matches for me if I do it this way? Or, is there a better way to enter name changes so the Geni system will search both names for me?

3 comments

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  Liivi Murumets June 06, 2011 11:27

  Currently there is only one last name field.

  Some people use → or ← to indicate a change. 

  http://www.geni.com/projects/Estonian-principles-of-entering-data

  4. When a last name has changed (localised or for some other reason), it is entered as "Newname ← Oldname", with space between name and arrow, Alt+27 to get the arrow (or use copy & paste). Numbers need to be entered from numpad, on a laptop it needs to be switched on using Fn + Num Lock.

  Once both versions have been entered, Geni should find matches for either of them.

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  Karen Beth Drexler June 06, 2011 21:14

  OK, I just want to make sure I understand this since I have so many family branches that changed their names when they immigrated to the USA from Eastern Europe. Using the above example, are you saying that if I enter this in the surname space:
  
  Feldman ← Feldon
  
  That Geni will search for matches for both surnames? Is that it? Is this THE way to get Geni to reliably do this?
  
  When I first joined Geni, I was told to change a man's gender to female, & enter the old name as a maiden name, save it, then change him back to a male. In that way, the old surname continues to show up in parenthesis after the new last name, the same way as a married woman's maiden name does.
  
  Since that never seemed to work, I figured there must be a better way!

• 0
  
  Liivi Murumets June 16, 2011 10:18

  Most of the time Geni finds matches automatically, sometimes it does not. Just of recent I saw one tree with 36 profiles and 0 matches even when the tree is identical to mine.

  I've seen so many cases where Geni looks on both last name and maiden name field to find matches - Miss Smith is matched to Mrs Smith, for example. So it should work for men when an alternative name is entered in maiden name field or when both names are in last name field. It seems to be a matter or luck sometimes :) quite frustrating with private profiles as manual comparison and merge request no longer works.

  There are times when a match is one sided - profile X shows a match to Y but Y shows no match to X.