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Geni naming conventions - Wales
See the projects Geni naming conventions and Geni naming conventions - data entry for general guidance.
- Use ordinary case. Name Preference Settings can be used to change how names are displayed to your personal preference.
- Name as close to original name as possible, language, geography and time period to be taken into consideration.
- Patronymics in the Middle Name field. (See below for changes in usage in the Welsh tree)
- Adjust First Name field to avoid misunderstandings or mistaken identity where necessary, by adding order/number or byname.
- Maiden names are normally avoided as there were none at the time.
- All names a person is known by in any source listed in Nicknames: bynames (especially in English), additional titles, variations.
- Document name sources.
Though the Welsh have recently started using the old naming customs, from about 1600 on, their names follow English customs. This is not true, however, for the middle ages and the early modern periods. Until the Laws in Wales Acts of 1535 and 1542, which caused Welsh law to be subsumed into English common law, most of the Welsh used the patronymic naming system. (The main exceptions to this would be found in the borderlands of the Welsh Marches, where Anglo Norman and Welsh gentry intermarried; you find many Welsh families there using surnames.)
In Welsh, the word "ap," or "ab," before a vowel (though “i” counts as a consonant) means "son of." So "Ieuan ap Rhys" means "Ieuan, son of Rhys." "Ferch," or "verch," (or "merch," in very early profiles), means "daughter of." So "Gwenllian ferch Madog" means "Gwenllian, the daughter of Madog."
1) "Ab" and "ferch" go together with the name of the father (or in some cases the mother) of the profile; put them together into the Surname fields; do not separate them, with the "ab" or "verch" in the middle name field, or capitalize them. (This becomes a problem when duplicates are merged, in which case it's easy to end up with problematic names such as Llewelyn ap ap Owain.)
2) Women do not change their names or take a different last name when they marry; Gwenllian ferch Rhys remains Gwenllian ferch Rhys when she marries. If she marries Caradog ap Rhirid she does not become Gwenllian ap Rhirid; she is not the son of Rhirid. It is a good idea to put the "ferch Rhys" into both of the surname fields, to keep mistakes from happening when duplicate profiles are merged. Even in cases wherein a Welsh woman is marrying into an Anglo-Norman family, she does not take her husband's surname. Like the Scots, the Welsh did not use married names until the Reformation.
3) Often, in the medieval Welsh profiles, people will have nicknames, such as "Mawr" or "Fawr" (the great), "Hir" (the tall), "Fychan" or "Vychan" (the younger), "Hen" (the old), "Llwyd" (the grey), "Goch" (the red), etc. These are often mistaken for surnames, but they are best put in the middle name field.
4) In the early modern period, after 1542, the Welsh gentry started using surnames, and the rest of the Welsh followed suit, slowly (rural areas kept the old system longest). But they had not originally had surnames, and so surnames needed to be invented (this is why there are a relatively small number of surnames used in Wales even now). These were created in various ways. "Ab Owain" became "Bowen," for instance, and "ap Rhys" became "Prys," or "Price." Sometimes people took their father's or grandfather's name as a surname; "Craddock," for instance, comes from "Caradog; "Traherne" comes from "Trahearn," and the like. Many of the nicknames became last names -- "Llwyd" became "Lloyd," "Vychan" became a last name in its own right, and "Goch" became "Gooch." During the many decades when the Welsh changed systems, there were name variations even within families. Best practice is to put the "Englished" name in the surname field, the Welsh name in the birth surname field, and any other variations into the nickname field. The family names straighten themselves out within a generation or two.