Spanish surnames

Gramaps 5.1.5, Windows 10

Hi all, spanish people have two surnames, first one is the father’s first surname and the second one is the mother’s first surname. For example, if these two people have a child:

  • Luis Aguilar López
  • Ana Fernández Mena

Tha name of the boy will be:

  • Antonio Aguilar Fernández.

However, after reading the manual and searching the forum / reddit I can’t figure out a way to configure Gramps to automatically fill the children surnames for spanish people. In the example above, this option:

Will erroneously produce Antonio Aguilar López (the first and second surnames from the father) instead of Antonio Aguilar Fernández.

As a result I have to manually edit all children names for all families, which is a little bit cumbersome.

Is there a way to do what I’d like to do? Any help is greatily appreciated.

NOTE: the “combination of mother’s and father’s surname” option works as expected when parents have a single surname, which, as I said, is never the case for spanish people (and I think for all spanish speaking countries)

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As a “jumping off point”, here are a few items in the Bug/Feature reporting system. Maybe this could fit in one of those? Some already have some interesting discussion points.

This 9612: Problem adding parents [with Latin names] is related to generating Parent surname from Children rather than the other way around. But the related ‘Commit’ shows how (and where) some of these functions are coded:


and several related feature requests:

I’ve had my ethnocentric blinders on. I never knew that was an option in the Surname Guessing. (That it does not work notwithstanding).

Ideally it would take the Primary Surname from the Father (Prefix, Surname, Connector) and the Primary Rawsurname from the mother.

This report is closely related to what I’m describing here, in fact I read it before posting, but he says children receive the right surnames (first father’s surname, and first mothers surname), both as patrilineal.

As explained above, I cannot reproduce this, in my example children receive first and second father’s surnames.

Yes, exactly. Combination of mother’s and father’s surname option in surname guessing doesn’t work correctly when parents have multiple surnames.

After experimenting a little bit further, the problem seems to be still worst, I reported it on the bugtracker:
https://gramps-project.org/bugs/view.php?id=11356#c64952

The second problem (wrong inherited surnames) seems to appear only when adding family members from the relationships screen, if you use the Family screen to add members, children will inherite the right surnames, but both as patrilineal.

However I don’t see an option to edit posts in the bugtracker to add this info, I guess a minimum of posts are required for that :frowning:

Thanks for improving that report.

The “surname guessing” feature isn’t currently applying any transformation to ‘origin’ portions of the names during a ‘guess’.

I’d wished it would insert a ‘Patrilineal’ when adding a child with the default Guessing. Or a Patronymic/Matronymic origin for Icelandic surname guessing.

The current feature just copies the ‘origin’ value from one generation to the next.

In the multiple name scenario, won’t the Patrilineal also be the ‘Primary’ surname? So Gramps should be copying the Primary surnames from Father & Mother and ignoring the other multiple surname rows. (Ideally, it would transform the inherited mother’s primary surname from Patrilineal to Martilineal and set the inherited father’s Patrilineal surname to be Primary in the child.)

So the “wrong” origin is actually a new feature request. The bug is that the “Combination” surname guessing is inheriting more than the Primary from the parent’s multiple surnames, correct?

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Yes, you’re right, I’ve mixed two different issues in the Bugtracker. To avoid confusion, I’ve opened a new, specific bug report:
https://gramps-project.org/bugs/view.php?id=12863

At this point, and after asome experimentation, I’m pretty sure the problem lies in the “Relationships” module. Adding children and sibling from there leads to incorrect results, but adding children (and parents) from the Family scren works nicely with spanish (multiple) surnames.

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