MAIDEN NAMES

As a genealogist I agree completely with you Diana Raquel Sainz Wilson I have told Mike at Geni many times that having a namefield called "Lastname at birth" is completely wrong and that Geni is almost alone in the genelogical community to have such a namefield. I have also asked Mike to get rid of this field since it's only making a mess to us genealogists.

I disagree completely with Jonathan Scott Krengel that Geni has fileds that are purpose built. to contain the information that is appropriate. Last name field, genealogically, is not for the surname at death, but for the surname at birth. Geni has made the name fields uncertaine, uninventive and unsupportive of the genealogical standard, which is incomprehensible for us genealogists.

Jonathan Scott Krengel if your great grandfather was born an Olsson, his lastname genealogically should be Olsson. Then when he changed his lastname later in life, that should be written in the AKA field on Geni, which is genealogically correct, as long as the namefields are as they are on Geni at this moment.

Hopefully, Geni will change their namefields to become more like the genealogical standard and have the possibility to add multiple names according to both time and source. But as of now, Geni is lacking bigtime compared most offline genealogical software.

if you want to view only maiden names then you can change your name preferences to birth surname instead of last name.

https://www.geni.com/account_settings/name_preferences

the vast majority of us prefer using married surnames. i dont know who these many curators you are referring to are besides Remi.

Remi is quite alone about that. He have the option show surname at birth only if that is his wish without destroying for others.

We need to fully use the fields that we have on Geni, independent of what a Remis program made last millennium is using.

I do however agree with Remi that Geni need a total redesign of the use of names with having multiple complete name fields with a classification (maiden, immigrant, military etc), time period and source option. These names should not be mixed as today. If they ever implement that, it is important to use both the last and maiden name field as of today in Geni to make it possible to automatically convert them to the new format.

However: When Geni introduced a language option to names to solve an alphabet problem I understood that there is a long way to go - My name should be pronounced the same independent of what alphabet it is using. Only when including language dependent titles, like in display name it is needed, but that can be solved by a classification. A person is not born as a King og President, - he/she is that only for a time-period.