Its been a long time issue i've been dying to see fixed and thats for Geni's algorithm to understand the layout for Finnish names. Before Ca 1850 alot of farmers and common folk didn't have last names which they went by but instead had their fathers name as a patronym to identify them. This patronym belongs in the middle name line. The "last name" was never passed down unless you were a more "Significant" person aka a priest with the say the name Avellan (which is a proper last name) Or Tawast which is a royal last name. So. Royals about 99% of the time had last names but the majority of commoners did not.
The layout is the following example;
If fathers name is;
First name; Petter
Middle name; Svensson (In this case the patronym used by commoners) (Aka his fathers name was Sven)
Last name; (Empty or chosen later in life but in most cases no last name was chosen)
Last name at birth; (Empty)
So Svensson wouldn't have been passed down back then since its not a proper last name.
The child's name would instead be the following:
First name; Johan
Middle name; Pettersson (In Finlands case a middle name would be a Patronym up to about 1850 which also acts as a sort of last name) (Aka his father being Petter)
Last name (Empty or chosen later in life but in most cases no last name was chosen)
Last name at birth (Empty)
Now, Geni does not understand this system as it wants the patronym as the last name due to all smart matches coming from typically English / American websites which don't have this feature either. Well also another effect this has is that hundreds of thousands of duplicate profiles are made which then go unnoticed due to the fact that Geni does not understand the Finnish naming system. Tree matches / Smart matches in general end up as 0 most of the time and more and more duplicates pop up which then makes a huge mess of things.
We'd love to see some sort of implementation which makes it easier for us who are researching Finnish ancestry to find tree matches and duplicates so we can with ease shape our trees.
This might be a difficult feature to implement i do admit but it would seriously help all of us. Despite trying to include everything I might've missed a bunch so its good to research this more and not guess that everything i wrote is everything there is.
Thank you, Marco
