Married Name in Person Box

[E Wilcock 0]

Until recently married women in the UK were known for most of their lives by their married surnames.

 

I want to add married names to the bottom of the women's boxes - it seems one can add almost any other information to the box.

But I dont seem able to find married name on the drop down list.

[RobinL 0]

There is only an ability in VCF to present the Primary Name of a person - no other names can be output without some redundant input by the user. (This is also seen as a shortcoming in other users of TMG/VCF like anthropology where there can be a legal requirement to show both the Indigenous Name and the Western Name on genealogical charts in court documents.) VCF will output up to 9 lines of data per person but these data can _only_ be extracted from primary Event tags. To overcome the single name limitation of VCF, the user must re-enter the second name as a Memo of a primary custom tag. Then you can output that Memo field in VCF - there will be no name formatting - what you enter is what you get. The unfortunate aspect is that the data lines in a box (apart from the first Name line) all share the same font/size/formatting setting. So even with this workaround, this second name cannot be made to standout or apart from the usual BMDB data lines.

 

There is a design problem within the TMG Primary/Non-primary designation of Name tags that makes overcoming this limitation quite difficult. What a user needs is a means to specify which other name tag(s) should be output. A person can have many married names or more than two alternative names - nobility and Spanish culture, apart from anthropology are examples that requirement would need to be addressed in any redesign. The design of GenBridge (used by VCF to get the TMG data) also limits what can be accessed, so the whole issue is extremely complex.

 

It is unlikely to happen soon, so if you want 2 names to be output, then you need to re-enter the name again in a primary Custom event tag.