First, thanks for your comment and observation regarding women’s names in FTB.
In FTB we added one field for a woman’s married name. We thought, and other genealogy software do this as well, that a person has only one last/married name at a time. So for example, when Jacqueline Bouvier married John Kennedy, her married name changed to “Kennedy”. Then when she married Aristotle Onassis, she changed her married name to “Kennedy-Onassis”, though every woman may choose to change her married name in a different way. So, if in your family there are women, like Jacqueline, that have married names that are built up of multiple husband’s names, you should enter this complex name for her married name manually in FTB. FTB cannot automatically assume that this is the case because in many other cases it is not. You can also use the “Additional names” form for even more complex situations.
Similarly with middle names. In the first name field, we advise our users to enter all the relevant middle names as well. So if in your family there is a “Mary Lee” who married “John Smith” and then changed her first name to “Mary Lee” and her last name to “Smith”, you may wish to enter “Mary Lee” as her first name. However, by default, FTB displays names of women by adding their maiden names in brackets, so in this case, the software will display her name, by default, as “Mary Lee Smith (Lee)” which may not be desirable. So, you may wish to change the display options in FTB (in the Tools > Options dialog) to show names of married women without adding their maiden names in brackets, and then FTB will show her name as simply “Mary Lee Smith”.
The problem of women's names is a more complex than many people appreciate. When you are doing genealogy research, you need the full name including the middle name of the person you are searching for information about. Since women, at least in the USA, frequently change both their last name and their middle name when they get married, you need to preserve both complete names. For instance, Mary Jane Smith marries Tom Jones and becomes Mary Smith Jones. If someone tries to search for Mary Jane Jones, her married name as FTB presently presents it, they will find nothing or the wrong person. If I enter both of her middle names, as you suggest, I get the confusing result of Mary Jane Smith Jones or Mary Jane Smith Jones [Smith] or Mary Jane Smith Smith, depending on which option I choose.
To the person who said that the married name is not important in genealogy, you have evidently never searched the Social Security Death Index (SSDI) to find out when one of your ancestors died. The SSDI only lists the name at the time of death, not the maiden name. Also, the married name is what shows up in census, wills and other public records. So, for females, you must know both names, and for those who have had multiple married names, you need to know those depending on the range of dates that you are searching.
I just searched the list of GEDCOM tags and found that there is no tag for middle names, only for given names and surnames, so I guess that there is no easy way to do what i would like to do. Could you at least change FTB so that the married name is preserved along with the marriage date and place?
On the subject of tags, why doesn't your website accept the GEDCOM prefix and suffix tags? Putting the Sr, Jr, II, etc. in the given or surname field, as I have seen some people do, confuses searches.
In my opinion, it is absolutely STUPID to change a woman's name in a genealogy file to reflect her marriage. So I agree with the original poster that this shouldn't be done.
Your name is your name -- given to you at birth, appended perhaps by a later naming rite (baptism, etc.) , it is yours forever. When combined with date and place of birth, it allows unique identification. It shows your heritage, and no one else's. It is the shortest means of identification for an individual. That's how I submit my trees to GenCircles.
In my research I have found several instances where a man married two women with the same given name, or ones that were close. Adding the married name to the mix just confuses matters. When you add the problem of multiple marriages for the woman, it just turns into an endless guessing game.
The use of married names for women in SmartMatches makes them DumbMatches, as far as I am concerned. Let;s see the surname of her father (in Western European traditions at least) and DON'T CHANGE MY DATA by your conventions.
For the Malay community in Malaysia, married women do not in general use their husband's name but use their maiden name instead. It is rather ackward to view their names in the family tree listings with their husband's name inserted as we are not familiar with that setting. We should have an option to NOT include thehusband's name.
You can change your settings either women with their maiden name or with their husbans' name. But there is no option, which leaves the name as it is, which is a real problem. My relative, who knows a lot about genealogy says My Heritage has a major flaw in this matter. There should be an option: the name stays as given. I ordered some posters, and the names were all wrong and the posters are useless. In Finland the women had their own names until about 1900 and then by law the husband's name and nowadays you can choose. Until the 19th century there were a lot of people not having a surname, but only a name and a patronymic. In the poster the programme put the man's patronymic as the wife's surname, that is really wrong. I have asked for this change a long time ago, I can't understand, how should it be so difficult! Waiting for an answer from My Heritage! Best wishes!
There is no way to show last names in more than one format in your tree and charts.
I apologize for the inconvenience.
My best suggestion for you would be to add the names according to the settings you chose, for example- display married names and add the last name that you want into the married name field.
This things drives me crazy, as all the charts and posters are wrong! In this world, where there are so many different traditions and laws about women's married names, it should be possible to let the names be as given in the tree and not to or change anything in them. The programme doesn't change mens' surnames either! There is no logic in this! I heard from a relative, who is genealogist, that genealogists don't generally use My Heritage for this reason, she was actually quite furious for this, as she ordered a chart and from some hundred names there came hardly anything out right. There must a way to add an option "no change on women's surnames"! Please pass this request forward!!!! Best wishes, Rita
We currently do not have this option, although thank you for the suggestion. I will be sure to forward it to the appropriate department for consideration.
Please let me know if you have any other ideas as we do value such input from our users.
I'm interested to see an integration of gegraphic information into Family Tree Builder & the resulting MyHeritage site. I would like to see how a family has grown and moved in time. e.g.:
add GPS coordinates of residential places (especially useful for cities that do no longer exist under that name; the current Goolge Map integrations fails when using the original city names)
see a timelaps view of an area that shows who was living in that area within a certain timeframe. You can see how the family grows and moves
see a geographic plot of a person's residents during his entire life
This will add a new level to MyHeritage: not only see the family as a factual database of relations, but also to see is change over time.
Yes to GPS functionality. We use the names of places that existed at the time the record was created. The ability to create a new location and then tag the GPS location would be great.
I love the calendar feature - so nice to get birthday updates in the weekly newsletter. I would like to print a hard copy of the calendar - but when I hit print - it tells me this is an upcoming feature. I'm not sure how long "upcoming" will be. Anyone have a clue how I can print the calendar now?
It would be great if we can point our own domain name to a MyHeritage family site, perhaps with a paid subscription. It's so easy to get your own domain name now and its easy for family members to remember.
Yes, I have already done that. But we have our own family domain name and it would be great if we could use that directly, like with google apps/sites. I suppose I can point the family domain name to myheritage.com, but once in, the address box will display the myheritage url.
There is no Montenegro on the list of countries, so i had to pick Croatia instead of my own country. Montenegro is an independent state for over two years, so this should have already been updated. Hope to see this problem solved.
It would be great to have widgets through which we would be able to pubish content (created and maintained here) on our other blogs or websites or exsisting family networking sites. Like google maps.
Hi I have some additions to add, (excuse my english)
being able to merge tree's (.ged) files from others
divide/split names into "van der Laan" to a prefix "van der" and name "Vos"
add plugin abbility for adding large amounts , example is standard website(s) with template easy for import export (and add check if info exsists or is duplicate / manual selection what to add)
add (search) sites as a refrence/source or todo
ad a todo list (from notes) with website (recurring check's)
check if website has been visited (when you checked the website ,, ad button done today if to keep track of you'r "checks"
split families (to exchange with others) or to better manage additions
add possibilite of man assuming wifes name (here in the netherlands its possible)
better zooming out (total overview off all people)
deleting people
conforming places to 1 standard (still able to use custom if you want)
adress of event (special location's like hospital/street adress)
select what to show on website and what not (merge into FTB software tree but don't publish)
notes / facts list overvieuw (like places)
website language based on language of browser (NL-NL or EN-NL )
I would love to have a variety of genealogy backgrounds and graphics available to dress up the Home Page. It is so stark looking. Would also love to have a way of presenting the virtual cemetery in some manner. Don't like seeing the photos come up mixed in with family photos....
"I would love to have a variety of genealogy backgrounds and graphics available to dress up the Home Page. It is so stark looking. "
Hello,
I agree with you that it would be nice to have some backgrounds/graphics, etc. to easily choose from when designing the Home Page....
What I have done to dress up my Home Page was to use Word to create a table and then I just partitioned the table into sections to fit my needs & the info I wanted to include using specific fonts and table shading to color each table section (must save your document as .rtf not .doc)....
hint...don't make your table as wide as your home papge, make it slightly smaller so it will fit. If it's too big, it will stretch the home page way out, and it doesn't look good then & is difficult to navigate--- just go back to Word and decrease your table size if this happens. (I have had to do this a few times/going back and forth to get it right, but the result was more satisfying than the stark page... & it's kinda fun to play with/design, & learn about the best ways of how to get it loaded to the website). --I'm working on how to figure out getting banners & clip art to show, becuse my first attempts for a small map & thistle clip didn't come through:( ...but I'll keep trying different things....
When done designing your table, right-click and copy it, then go to your myheritage home page, and click the edit this text line....
When you go to edit your current home page text, just place the cursor under/after the current text in the Welcome/Intro paragraph then paste the table into the home page text area.
When I want to change/edit/add new info, I just go into my saved Word .rtf document, bring up the table & edit it, save it, copy it, & paste again to myheritage home page. A lot easier to to do editing/designing in Word, then copying to myheritage (after you get the table format/size fit right). I even added hyperlinks to the text in my table and it comes through fine on the home page, so members can link to external websites that are pertinent to your site/your family, which is a very nice option. Hope this may be helpful in some way....
I recently had a user entering data without paying close attention and they listed two people as married with children in error but when I tried to correct it I learned of your systems issues of deleting people with children. Deleting people with children is not the only issue, how do you disconnect marriages made in error and reconnect them to an existing person in the database? The in ability to fix these marriages caused me to delete my whole "database" and start over which caused a lot of frustration considering how much i had into it.
It would be nice to have an iPhone app as nice GUI to access the site rather than using an small screen web browser when on my iphone. There is only one genealogy program for the iPhone that I know of so you would have little competition. Also it would be very nice at family gatherings to take a photo with my iPhone right to my MyHeritage.com
I concur - I hope that MyHeritage will soon make MyHeritage available on iPhones.
Also, I would be grateful to hear if it is in the pipeline and if so when it will be available, so I might wait for it instead of buying another iPhone genealogy program.
