Genealogy Chat

Have just come across an entry on 1841 census where the woman has been quite correctly enumerated in her married name, but another researcher has sent in an amendment to show her under her maiden name, even though she had been married for several years.
I contacted the person to point out that the record was correct as it stood, but he insists he wants to show her maiden name,
Not going to argue, but very confusing for anyone in the future.

Unfortunately it happens all the time that people feel the maiden name should be added.

Agree that the record is correct for the census

I only know about Ancestry, where when this happens it isn't a problem because both get displayed and used in searches.

What is irritating is when someone adds an incorrect correction when the original is right. In that case I add an additional correction with supporting evidence. Recently I did that where a name beginning with L, had been corrected to begin with an S. Admittedly the L did look like an S but there were other obvious Ls on the sheet that I could point to and I did know that the name should begin with L.

FMP have a different way which I find equally annoying

I have sent corrections for family transcriptions where I know the family names and these are clearly obvious to me ,but the transcriber has decided the writings says something different

Have often got a reply from FMP to say they have looked at my correction but decided THEY ARE RIGHT. so won't accept my correction

I have quite a lot of amendments in my lines (Ancestry) where the spelling has changed over the years, possibly due to a mixture of dialect and illiteracy and peope have changed it to the modern spelling,fortunately Ancestry do show both but I agree with wildchild, it is irritating !

If I'm searching for a married woman in the census I am looking for her married name NOT her maiden name. If I look for a second marriage then her maiden name won't help me unless I can see the fathers name on the entry.

I've come across pages and pages of added maiden names on ancestry - must have taken ages to add. Ok if you trust other people but we all have instances of finding other people adding incorrect info into their trees.

Just had a rather snooty reply from this person, saying he does it all the time.
When a woman marries, she legally becomes known by her husband´s surname(or did years ago). Therefore if she is in a census under her married name, that is how it should be transcribed. To use her maiden name just confuses the issue........jn my opinion.

Hi,

For me having the maiden name at the top of the transcript as well as married name helps in researching her if you don't know her married name and doesn't really interfer for me with the actual census.

Each to their own I suppose. Personally, when I find a person on the census, I prefer to look for the marriage before I add the maiden name, having been led up the garden path on more than one occassion

wisechild
I'm with you on this.

On a census, I expect a woman to be named reflecting her status at that time. I would not expect, or want to see this corrected to her maiden name.

Maiden names should be used when logging a person into eg. GR searches.
I have found it frustrating at times when I've contacted people on here who have a person with unusual surname in an area where I too have that surname.
To get a reply, "Oh I don't know anything about them, they just married in" is so annoying...
Well then, I wish they would please log them with their correct birth name.

Gwyn

The problem is that the information is supposed to be a transcription of what is on the census form.

If someone adds a correction that is not amending an obvious mistranscription, then it should be backed up by supporting references rather than just having the "incorrect in image" box ticked.

Adding a maiden name may be useful but only if it is submitted with the GRO reference of the marriage or similar information. Otherwise it is of little value.

Edit: added a not the absence of which contradicted what I meant. :-|

Of course I always look for a marriage to check it's the right one but if there are a many marriages to check it helps to cut them down. I have recently been looking for my 3rd great Aunt and cannot find a marriage for her but she turned up on 2 census luckley with her father and with a husband George Peet but one census has her father a Bentley and one as Varney, Varney being the right name, so having Varney added to the census with the Bentley name would help in searching for her.

And still cannot find a marriage for Harriett Varney or Bentley to George Peet.

I don't think that adding a maiden name is meant as a correction to the census but as extra information to help.

Wendy is right.

It seems that Ancestry actually encourage their subscribers to add additional info such as maiden name to assist with searching.

Perhaps then it would be a good idea if Ancestry showed this as an extra submission rather than amendment.
An amendment suggests that the original entry was wrong, which in cases like tis. it wasn´t.

When an amendment is done Ancestry does not say so on the Transcript so why should they if its added info.

When you add a maiden name you do it under "add alternate name" not as a amendment you can also do this for year of birth, age and place of birth if they are different to what is on census.

Ancestry has a category for 'Maiden Name' when you click to add a name to a census record.

why on earth would someone object to this being added?

Ancestry's records are not some sort of official document, they are a database compiled by Ancestry to which users can add information for the benefit of other users

that information is just called 'alternate information' and it is clearly marked as contributed by a user and shows the user's name ... I don't see anything there about 'amendment' even where something clearly is an amendment of an Ancestry error

has no one every tried to find a woman after marriage when they did not know whom she had married? you can search by given name and date and place of birth ... but if her name was Mary Smith and she was born in London you might be searching a long time and might never find her

if someone who knows more about her adds her birth surname to her census record after marriage, you will be able to find her, why would you object to that?

I also do it the other way around, add a woman's married surname to her census record before marriage (and also add other kinds of name changes, like a child who takes a stepfather's surname in later life), all to help anyone else looking for that person ... and so anyone else looking for that person finds me too, and I have met distant relations that way

I started doing this a long time ago and there is another effect now too that wasn't there in the early years, Ancestry automatically shows other records that may relate to a person ... it uses user-added information for putting together that list, so you don't even have to do the search sometimes, the system finds it for you (and of course that has to be checked out like anything else)

a woman's name changed with marriage but a name is just a name, her identity did not change, there is no reason that someone should not indicate the other names by which she had been or would be known in order to identify her for others ... by the way there has never been anything 'legal' about women using their husband's surname in the sense that the law required it, it is pure tradition and nothing else

I do think that people who add information to records should take the 10 seconds to add an explanation, like 'name when born', since even if you do select 'Maiden Name' Ancestry no longer shows that I think

complaining about someone adding helpful information, I just don't understand ... I can understand someone being snooty about being told off for doing something the site they pay to use encourages! :-D

by the way I would also add that Ancestry itself does this

when a married woman is living in her parents' household and is shown as their daughter, Ancestry's system automatically adds her birth surname to their record in square brackets just as if a user had added the info

the problem is that this is not uncommonly incorrect, for instance if she was the daughter of her mother by a previous marriage ... or if the household is one of those mashups Ancestry creates when people are mistranscribed as being all in one household ...

I would rather see information added by someone who might at least have the correct information :-)

JoonieCloonie you explained better then I could have done :-D :-D

I would also like to added that if no one added maiden names what about the census where the couple didn't marry but down as married.

OK, I concede that Ancestry does have a slot for Maiden Name. I think that must be a fairly recent addition. I have no objection to that as it oviously gets marked as such.