Hi, I’m doing my Polish genealogy, the biggest problem of which is language. Half of our surnames are adjectives, and therefore they change ending based on gender, like -ski for males and -ska for females. It’s even worse when we consider the old style of noun-based names. We had to add -ówna for maiden names and -owa for names taken of husbands. That part is no longer in use, but it stands to reason that in genealogy I should use names the ancestors would use themselves.
So the question is, how do I approach it? I know I can group names, but it is tedious, and not everything takes note of it, especially surname statistics on the main page shows every variant separately. Are there any other methods, perhaps some plugins that would help?
In the Name Edit window there is a Group As option.
In a person edit window, there is a Names tab. It opens the Names Editor (double-click on a name) that provides additional name options as well as the option to add alternate names.
In the General tab there is a Group As option activated with the Override check box. You can enter the new surname. It will stop and ask if this name grouping should apply just for this individual or for all individuals that shares the same surname. I suggest you do it for all.
To be clear, this option does not alter any person’s surname, it just changes how and where the people are grouped in grouped name lists.
I use this option and had an Aha Moment. The name I enter as the override name would be “Clark (Clarke)” and I do this for those people named “Clark” and “Clarke”. Maybe you could do the same with something like “common name (-ski, -ska, -owna, …)”
Additional note. Depending on how you set the display name, this will affect how the names are displayed within the Grouped As name. I set the my display to start with the Given Name. This brings my “John Clark” to be displayed with my “John Clarke” records. The alternative was all the “Clark, given name” records and then the “Clarke, given name” records. This may be something you want to consider.
To cover all the bases, this is the wiki about Names in Gramps. Patronymic naming may be relevant to your genealogy.
Thanks, but I’ve already done that and it isn’t a perfect solution, still the name in statistics gets counted as two separate names, and still it’s tedious. Is there no other way to handle it?
Without rewriting the code for the statistic gramplets (beyond my limited talents) I do not see a solution. As I mentioned, the Group As does not change the person’s actual surname.
The Group As set to apply to all individuals with the same surname needs only be set once. Adding new people will automatically apply the appropriate Group As option.
I have only about a dozen Polish names in my extended tree (my cousin’s ancestors), and I simply entered them according to their birth names, -ski for the males and -ska for the females. There’s no need for me to group them, because in the People view I can enter the first part of a surname in the Name filter and all of them will appear.