Ингигерда Олофсдотер - I believe that 'Olofsdotter' is not a correct family name

Started by Volodya Mozhenkov on Thursday, June 30, 2016
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6/30/2016 at 10:50 PM

Olofsdotter would be a patronymic, which is currently linked to the 'middle name' field on Geni (there really should be two separate fields, but still).

She is a daughter of Olof, and that is what that title means.

6/30/2016 at 11:02 PM

The usual habit in the Nordic tree is to put the patronymic in the Last Name field if there isn't a surname known, and into the Middle Name field when another surname is known. This works around some Geni quirks with people who have turned off display of the Middle Name field (a bad idea, but some still do it).

In the Nordic tree, a further complication is that the common form of "formal name" up until around 1900 was <given name> <patronymicon> <farm name> - with the <farm name> changing as the family moved, but if they moved to a city, they were likely to keep it as their surname. Some people argue that the <farm name> should be in the "location" fields, not in the "name" field, but usually people write whatever's in the sources into the name fields - including the farm name.

For Ingegerd, no farm is known :-)

6/30/2016 at 11:30 PM

Ok,

I guess it's the conflict in regard to different 'cultures', because Geni actually has translated 'middle name' as if it were 'patronymic' into Russian, and now almost all Russian people are putting patronymic there.

And here we have a Nordic name that is for a Russian Czarina...

Perhaps Geni should introduce an all together different 'patronymic' field after all, which would could be used for those cultures where they are used.

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