The Name Game - Wed, 16 Dec 2009

A GEDCOM file contains a person’s name on the NAME tag. It normally looks like this:

1 NAME first middle /surname/ suffix

e.g. 1 NAME John Jacob Jingleheimer /Schmidt/ II

The name parts should be shown in the order given, but without the two slashes that surround the person’s surname.

To make this trickier, some East Indian names are in the form:

1 NAME /surname/ middle first

and should be displayed in that order.

I had Behold handling the East Indian names correctly, and I’ve now got it to handle the suffix automatically and correctly as well.

Behold is fairly unique in its ability to take the wife’s surname at birth and add the surnames of all the men she is matched to, ending with her final spouse, e.g. Mary Jane [Watson Osborn] Parker.

Now there are times you’ll want to override that. One example was a file that had under the marriage record a date of “NOT MARRIED”. So I check for that and do not add the husband’s surname in that case. I don’t know of any other instances where that sort of an indication is in the GEDCOM, but if I find any, I’ll add them. Once I get to Version 2.0 and editing, Behold itself will store this “override” into the file, so you’ll have complete control.

Some people have asked for the ability to turn off the generation of married names in Behold. While fixing the names, this turned out to be a very simple thing to do. So I’ve now added a Report option for this. Then Behold will give you less information than you’ll want just like other programs do.