" The whole point was to display both married and birth names"
Of course both, no question. My comment was about how to display them.
I propose “Birthname spouse Marital” rather than “Marital née Birthname”. Not eliminating one of them.
Edit: I didn’t know about US-legal ‘coverture’, so I looked it up. Wow…
“Coverture held that no female person had a legal identity. At birth, a female baby was covered by her father’s identity, and then, when she married, by her husband’s. The husband and wife became one –and that one was the husband. As a symbol of this subsuming of identity, women took the last names of their husbands.”
Learnt something today. Thanks.
A possible workaround: one could use the attached Supertool script to generate a new artificial name for people. The new name would contain both the birth name and the married name. This new name should probably be used only temporarily while e.g. preparing a report.
[Gramps SuperTool script file]
version=1
[title]
combine_surnames
[category]
People
[initial_statements]
# Script that processes all people that have both a BIRTH surname and a MARRIED surname. Generates new surnames that contains both names and
# sets those as the primary names. This can be used as a temporary display name in e.g. graphs and reports. The change can be reverted using the
# Gramps undo function (Edit > Undo).
#
# The type of the new name is set to "Generated" and the format would be like "<marriedsurname> (née <birthsurname>)". These can be changed,
# see the settings below.
#
# Example:
#
# Birth name:
# Firstname: "Anna"
# Surname: "Smith"
# Married name:
# Firstname: "Anna"
# Surname: "Jones"
#
# -->
#
# Generated:
# Firstname: "Anna"
# Surname: "Jones (née Smith)"
from gramps.gen.lib import NameType, Name, Surname
FMT = "{marriedsurname} (née {birthsurname})"
NAMETYPE = "Generated"
count = 0
[statements]
birthsurname = None
marriedsurname = None
if len(names) == 2:
for name in nameobjs:
if name.get_type() == NameType.BIRTH:
birthname = name
birthsurname = name.get_surname()
if name.get_type() == NameType.MARRIED:
marriedname = name
marriedsurname = name.get_surname()
firstname = name.get_first_name()
if birthsurname and marriedsurname:
newname = Name()
newname.set_type(NAMETYPE)
newsurname = Surname()
generatedsurname = FMT.format(marriedsurname=marriedsurname, birthsurname=birthsurname)
newsurname.set_surname(generatedsurname)
newname.set_surname_list([newsurname])
newname.set_first_name(firstname)
person.set_alternate_names([birthname,marriedname])
person.set_primary_name(newname)
count += 1
[filter]
[expressions]
"Generated {} names".format(count)
[scope]
all
[unwind_lists]
False
[commit_changes]
True
[summary_only]
True
One remark about Née and names like “Jones (née Smith)”.
Née is the feminine form, applicable to females only. It is Né for males.
Nowadays it does happen that men take their wife’s name. Not to mention the same-sex, trans/etc unions.
For perspective the standard way to handle this in some European countries is to omit Né/e altogether: “Jones (-Smith)” or “Jones (Smith)”, which work no matter the gender.
Some of translation of abbreviations is needed. In Finnish we use “os,” for birth surname (longer “omaa sukua”=“own family”). “ent.” is used for previous marriage surname (comes from “entinen=previous”. Recently I saw an obituary of late lady consisting of four surnames, three of them happily (hope) marriage names.
To my mind “taken” is completely separate concept from marriage surname,
But Gramps does not have these abbreviations hard-coded, or am I missing (misunderstanding) something? Whether you use “born”, "birthname " or a simple (), it is all user input defined in the display name editor.
A bit surprised that the (so obviously illogical) design with two ways to enter a married name, is seemingly not noted at all in this discussion. One works with the display name editor, but the other one does not (see my post from Feb 6th).
Well, in looking at how the automatic sunaming is handled, it only exists in the builtin Relationship view and the Family object editor – where the necessary Spouse/Parent context to make a biased Guess is accessible.
(To be fair, the experimental CardView also supports surname guessing in its right-click context menu option to add a Spouse or Offspring)
It is logical for the add in the Person object editor’s Name tab to look for the necessary context, when context exists (with the option to select an override for the surname guessing bias in preferences) apply the surname Guessing rules. GRAMPS 5.1 doesnt currently support that. It’s an enhancement you could request.
Of course, the guess-as-you-type for surname does not exist in the Multiple Surnames table or Names tab either. Extending that capability would be more consistently useful to my data entry workflow.
Until the Surname Guessing bias affects more point in the workflow, its unlikely that code contributors will put in the effort to write more complex surname guessing rules for other societal biases. (Such as neé/né formats or “omaa sukua” or “entinen”)
Sorry, I guess I don’t understand how this issue connects in any way to the automatic surname functionality. What I’m ranting about is simply that one can add a married surname in two ways, both result in Gramps showing the identical label “married name”. One works with the editor, one does not. Why are there two places for input?
What you call automatic Surname is labeled as “Surname Guessing” by its control in the Display tab of Preferences.
A wife can have multiple Married names. They could be sequential (the date ranges in multiple marriages) or concurrent (in the US, with a Missus/Mrs. title could be introduced informally with her given name plus taken surname; or, by her husband’s given & patrilineal surname; or, very formally with a hypenated surname using her birth surname and any taken surname(s)) in each marriage. I’m ignoring modern political correctness since, genealogically speaking, the timespan it has existed is negligible.
All the primary and alternate names work with name object editor. But only the primary name has features of the name editor directly editable in the Person object editor. If you want access to the extra display, grouping and timespan features for the primary name, click the Edit bitton to the right of the Suffix.
There are multiple places for input for convenience sake. Virtually EVERYTHING can be entered in various manners to support differ workflows.
Most people will only have a primary name. Since the Primary Name fields had to be shown anyway as identifiers in the Person object editor, the developer simply made those fields editable. It makes data entry more convenient, most of the time.
There is only one way to enter a person’s married name in Gramps. The user adds an additional Name record to the person using the Type “Married Name”.
The Display Name editor can only manipulate how the name fields within a name record will be displayed. The Display Name editor CANNOT extract an entry from one name record and use it in another.
After giving a person additional name records to record changes in a person’s name over time, including adding any number of Married Name records, the Gramps user can decide which of these names will display as the person’s Preferred Name. The Preferred Name will be the name used in all reports. In the reports that print additional names, the Preferred Name will still be the main entry name.
These are the current limitations within Gramps.
If you wish to explore the options available in the Display Name editor, the code can be found in the program folder:
Not true! There are two ways to add a married name:
From the person view, select a person, select the names tab, and click the + on the left side, just beneath the events tab. Type the married name in the field for Surname, and set the type to Married Name.
From the person view, select a person, and on the opening events tab, click the + on the right side, next to the origin field tab, and on the following screen click the + for multiple surnames, add one, and set the type to Married Name.
Both ways result in Gramps showing an identical field labeled ‘married name’, but only names entered by method 2 are picked up by the Display name editor.
What you are editing IS the Name record that is slotted in the Preferred Name position.
Follow the same instructions for your No 2 above. Instead of selecting the [ + } on the far right to add a surname line, move up to the icon at the end of the Suffix field.
Go to Name Editor to add more information about this name
Hmmm… What I wanted to point out was that methods 1 and 2 both result in the identical ‘married name’ label - so IMO it is very illogical that one does not function the same way as the other. A user cannot know which one is the fully functional one.
In my particular case, the base for my tree is a Gedcom import, with 3000+ records (as I switched programs) and all married names appear as described in method 1, so they are not functioning with the Display Name Editor.
When you create a person, Gramps will create the first Name record, give it the Type “Birth Name” and slot it in the Preferred Name slot. In the Person’s edit window, the basics of the Preferred name is displayed and editable. The advanced name edit options by using the edit icon I just highlighted or going to the Names tab to open its full edit window. Additional names can be added under the Names tab.
Regardless of one or ten names in the Names tab, each name is its own record, each attached to the main Person record.
You say the married names appeared using your previous program. Did the program do this automatically imposing this naming convention on the married woman? Did the previous program actually add information to the person’s record? Information exported/imported through a GEDCOM?
One of the strengths of Gramps is the program never dictates how a user uses the program and creates their genealogical tree.
This is also one of its stumbling blocks, leaving the user to determine how they are going to use the tools Gramps has given them to build their genealogical tree.
Gramps would never presume to automatically give a woman a married name. Besides there being various cultural norms from around the world, there would be variations for many individual women.
For the user, Gramps has given us more than one Name record where we can document a person’s various names over their lifetime, including their married names.
Not really, there is a place for a birth surname, and a surname (which for the last 200 years mostly has been the husband’s name for women in Northern Europe, but let’s not go into a discussion about that).
With appeared I mean that when imported with Gedcom, all the surnames (married names) appear in Gramps as per method 1.
why is this topic such a hassle?
Gramps works on a database principle, shouldn`t it be possible to just get a text based line in the name editor which works like this:
IF married ID(:),Name(:), “born” birthname(:), surname(:), …
Else ID(:),Name(:), “born” birthname(:), surname(:), …
It should be possible to access all database entries by classical data-structure access options. Like everybody does in MATLAB, Python, r and others. Then users can combine every database entry with whatever they like to print out.
Of course some people could hack the name.py, but is this really necessary?
