Why I Use 5 Underscores for Unknown Names

Why, to get hints. Hopefully, will demonstrate that here.



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Copyright © 2017 by H R Worthington

How Do You Handle Female Names?

My friend Randy Seaver of Genea-Musings had a question about how he handles Female Names. I encourage you to read it.

Dear Randy: How Do You Handle Female Names?

It's been a while since I have blogged about this one, so here is my take on this subject.

The first thing to understand, for me, is the question of how to handle Unknown Names. My rule of thumb, in my database is the use of 5 Underscores [ _____ ]. If it's a female and I don't know the Given nor Birth Surname I enter it as [ _____ _____ ]. If there are other names for this person, like a married name, these 5 Underscores will be the Preferred Name.

My Index, in the People Workspace, Tree View, looks like this:

Yes, I have a lot of Unknown Names. and a lot of unknown Female Birth Surnames:

But, It works for me. For Example, I find a Find-A-Grave Memorial, where the Married name is provided. The husband is George McNaughten Vial and the memorial has for his wife Emma Frost Vial, I add the 5 underscores to the Preferred Name.

This is what the Person View looks like.

The memorial has her married name, and the Find-A-Grave citation is recorded for that Name Fact, but marked as the Alt Name Fact. The Preferred Name is with the 5 underscores.

When I find a Census Record that lists where the Parents were born, I want to capture that. It may be helpful when looking at other records. In this case, I use assume that the Surname for the Father to be the Surname of the person in the Census Record, for recording this. I realize that it may not be the actual surname, but I have not run into that "problem" yet. But I carry the Unknown Given Name and the Surname from the "child" in the Census Record. For the Mother, both the Given and Surname I handle the same way, with my Unknown Name strategy. This important thing is that I capture the birth location and Cite it.

REASON:

1. Does not interfere with Hints
2. Does not interfere with Searching on websites
3. Reminds me I need to find the Birth Surname
4. and when others review my work, they help Fill In the Blanks

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Copyright © 2017 by H R Worthington

File Sharing and Brick Walls - Part 2 - Unknown Names

Continuing this series of File Sharing and Brick Walls - Part 1 - Import and wanting to help a colleague with a Brick Wall, the next step is to take a look at what is in this new file.

There are a couple of things that I want to do here:

• Unknown Names

• Place Name

• Citations

 I have a way of handling Unknown Names. I use 5 Underscores, if I don't know a name, be it a given name or a surname. [ _____ _____] for example. Before I started to look at how to do this, I considered the input and the output. What really caught my eye was on the output. People want to help "fill in the blanks". The 5 underscores, from my experience, has helped with this.

The Place Names Authority in Family Tree Maker has a purpose, mostly to get the data consistent but is very helpful when using the Place Workspace, and the Map feature. 

In my own file, some times it is obvious that a Place Name is a historical place name, like St. Mary's Parish, Maryland. In this case, I generally will double enter data. Once with the Historical Place name that would be reflected in a document (source) that I am looking at, but I may also include the "current" place name that the Place Name Authority of Family Tree Maker would suggest. I do want to use the Mapping feature. There are resources that may help over lay the Historical Place Name with the Current Place Name.

In this specific case, I am not sure that this will be an issue.

For Citations, I want to see what is and what is not documented AND I want to be able to have a Citation on Every FACT that was included in this imported file. That isn't a feature to do this in FTM2012, but I will show how I did that in this case.

Going to the People Workspace, I wanted to Set the Home Person for this project. I entered Knapp, William in the "Find" field, and right clicked on that name and selected Set As Home Person. The advantage of this is for quickly being able to see any relationship between anyone in the file and this Home Person.

Looking at the Index (Left Hand Panel), here are a few people with our Surnames. C. Mary, Clara, and two Elizabeth's. I will now change them to make their surname _____.

I selected Clara, and entered "_____" (without the quotes) after "Clara" and moved to the next field. Below is the result of that. The Pedigree shows her with the 5 underscores, the Family View, the wife's surname has the same underscores. This is just a reminder that so far, we don't have the surname for this person.

What I did notice on Clara, was the letter "Y" in the Death Fact for her. There isn't a Death Date, nor Place. The Description field would normally be filled in with a more specific location, like "At Home" or the name of a hospital, an address, or a little more detail for where the death took place. If it was a Burial Fact, the Description might be for the name of a Cemetery.
  

So, what is this "Y" all about?

Looking at Roots Magic 4, there is an option to make a person as "living" when death information is not present. Or said differently, no check mark would indicate that the person had died. Below is a screen capture from Roots Magic 4.

That lack of a Check Mark, in that GEDCOM file, shows up as "Y" in the Death Description filed on import into FTM2012. Running a Custom Report in FTM2012, there were 49 people in this file with this indication. For now, I won't clean this up. Only pointing out A reason to Look carefully at your data before merging a file into your own file.

All of the Unknown Surnames have been updated as seen by the Index on the Left.

Lesson Learned: How do YOU handle Unknown Names?


Copyright © 2011 by H R Worthington