4 Ways to Handle Names in Your Family Tree

What's in a name? History, ancestry, culture…everything.

How do you record people's names in your family tree? Each time someone asks this question, I say it's a matter of personal preference. But, to be honest, some methods are better than others.

For a professional opinion, see Kimberly Powell's "8 Rules for Properly Recording Names in Genealogy" on ThoughtCo.

While I do not capitalize last names as Ms. Powell suggests, she does offer sound advice. I find the CAPITALIZATION to be distracting and unnecessary.

Here's my take on recording names in a family tree.

1. Maiden Names vs. Married Names

A woman's maiden name is the holy grail. You can't find her ancestors without learning her maiden name. That's why I always use a woman's maiden name. You may say, "But her married name makes it easy to see who she married." Actually, your family tree makes it easy to see who she married. And if she married 2 or more times, you're not accounting for at least one husband's last name.

This became a non-starter for me when I learned that Italian women keep their maiden name for life. The vast majority of women in my family tree lived their lives in Italy. I've told my husband that if I die first, he'd better damn well put my maiden name on my marker.

2. Given Names, Known As Names, and Nicknames

I prefer to record each person's name as it appears on their birth record, if available. A person may not "go by" their given name throughout their life. My great grandmother was born Marianna but often used her late sister's name Mariangela.

You can record multiple names for a person, but I make their given name the preferred name.

You can use a person's given name as their primary NAME fact. Add a 2nd NAME fact to record their preferred name. Add a 3rd NAME fact to record a nickname. Many of my parents' family members had nicknames like Baldy or Blondie. It's a great idea to capture those nicknames, too. You can always use a person's Notes section to explain how, where, and why people used a nickname.

No one knew my grandmother by her birth name of Maria Carmina. That's how I've recorded her in my family tree because it was a major discovery. I can record Mary as a 2nd NAME fact.

3. Spelling Changes

Speaking of Grandma, as soon as I began this wonderful hobby, I discovered a name change. At birth, Grandma and her 4 siblings had the family name Sarracino, with 2 Rs. That spelling is on all 5 marriage records. After that, the family went by Saracino with 1 R. My 2 Sarracino great uncles produced 2 Saracino kids. The male is legally a Saracino with 1 R. So is his son and his son's wife and children.

I recorded Grandma's generation as Sarracino, but her brothers' descendants as Saracino.

Things get confusing when a name is changed, but I honor the at-birth legal name.

Things are trickier with a family that came from Italy. Their original surname was diPaola. In America, different parts of the family adopted different spellings. There's diPoalo, DePoalo, DePaul, DePaulo. It gets harder to see who's related and how.

While searching for my connection to a DNA match, I didn't know which spelling was hers. Her family tree gave me 1 married couple's names as help. But that worked, and I have placed her in my tree. She gets the same spelling variation as her father.

4. Unknown Names

I used to record "Unknown" wherever I had a missing first name or last name in my family tree. It surprised me when a cousin looked at a tree printout and said, "Oh, I'm sure they knew her name."

That left me open to suggestions for a better way to record someone with a missing name. Along came Ancestry's chief genealogist, Crista Cowan. She mentioned it in one of her "Barefoot Genealogist" lessons on YouTube. She uses a blank (_____), consisting of 5 underscore characters, to show that a name is missing.

A blank line is something anyone who's ever taken a test can understand.

I do all my work in Family Tree Maker. The people with _____ for a last name appear at the top of the alphabetical index. On Ancestry.com, they're at the end, after last names beginning with Z. The blanks show me I need to keep trying to find that missing name.

My family tree is all about origins and roots. (Isn't yours?) I cherish all the family names and all the given names. I pay homage to my roots by recording and displaying the original names. Their names are everything.

And speaking of names:

• This Genealogy Policy Takes the Guesswork Out of Names
• Same Name; Which Ancestor is Which?
• 5 Ways to Find Your Female Relative's Married or Maiden Name

How to Diagram a Mystery DNA Match

This is what I'll do when a DNA match is too abstract to make sense.

One of Mom's DNA matches is driving me crazy. Mary and Mom share 250 centiMorgans. That's a lot for someone I can't identify. Ancestry DNA says there's a 67% chance they are:

• 2nd cousins
• 1st cousins twice removed
• half 1st cousins once removed, or
• half 2nd great aunt/niece.

Mary learned from her DNA test that her father was not her biological father. A mutual DNA match led to the name of her father. I recognized the last name from my ancestors' hometown.

It looks like Mary's biological father's grandmother is my blood relative. Her name was Maria Grazia Sarracino. Sarracino is my maternal grandmother's maiden name. Everyone named Sarracino in their little hamlet in Italy is family. But the town has very limited vital records available.

I looked at Mary and Mom's shared matches. Two people have the last name of Mary's birth father, 1 has the name Saracino, and 1 has a Sarracino grandmother.

I decided to research Maria Grazia Sarracino—the grandmother of Mary's birth father. Her daughter was Angela Coviello—Mary's biological grandmother. She was born in 1895 to Angelo Coviello and Maria Grazia Sarracino. Angela's birth record does not say Maria Grazia Sarracino's age. I searched for more of her children, hoping for more details.

It was obvious Maria Grazia was Angelo's 2nd wife. They kept having babies until he was at least 62 years old. And there were no children born before 1893. Maria Grazia probably married Angelo in 1892. The last child I found was born in 1904. The 1905–1909 records are missing, but Angelo was getting quite old. None of their children's birth records include Maria Grazia's age or the name of her father.

Maria Grazia Sarracino was most likely born between 1860 and 1875. But without the records, I can't look for her marriage to Angelo Coviello. I can't look for her death. And I didn't find her birth.

Would a diagram of all Mary and Mom's possible relationships help solve this DNA mystery?

This turned out to be incredibly helpful. I started with my Relationship Calculator spreadsheet. (Download the file for free. Can't open an Excel file? Here's the Google Sheets version.) The calculator tells you your exact relationship to a cousin.

You can also use this relationship calculator to narrow down your connection to a DNA match. Here's how I did it:

• Duplicate the worksheet onto a new tab, leaving the original untouched.
• Highlight the cells that match your estimated relationship to your DNA match. (Note: The estimated relationships come from AncestryDNA. If you're not a subscriber, enter the shared amount of centiMorgans in this tool: https://dnapainter.com/tools/sharedcmv4.)
• I highlighted full relationships in yellow: 2nd cousin, and in 2 locations, 1st cousin 2 times removed.
• I highlighted half relationships in orange: 1st cousin, 1st cousin 1 time removed (in 2 locations), and 2nd Great Grand niece/nephew (in 2 locations).
• Delete or empty all the rows, columns, and cells you haven't highlighted.
• Add names to make things clearer. If Mom is the child of the common ancestor, then the common ancestor is Grandma. Put the appropriate name in each highlighted cell.
• Think through each relationship. You'll know that some are impossible, so you can cross them out.
• The remaining cells are your strongest possibilities.

This simple diagram showed me the most likely relationship between Mom and Mary.

I started with the easiest one: both locations of 2nd Great Grand niece/nephew. For one to be true, Mary would have to be the 3rd great grandchild of my grandmother. Mary's older than me, and a stranger, so that's impossible.

For the other to be true, Mary would have to be the child of my mother's 3rd great grandfather who died in the early 1800s. Also impossible. I crossed out both cells.

Next I looked at Mom's Grandchild column. These cells all have my great grandfather Giovanni's name in them. I know all Giovanni's children, grandchildren, and great grandchildren. So I know Mary can't be his grandchild, great grandchild, or 2nd great grandchild. I crossed out all 3 cells.

Then I skipped a column and looked at Mom's 2nd great grandfather, Antonio. He couldn't be Mary's grandfather because he lived too long ago. I crossed out his cell.

That left 2 possible relationships for Mom's great grandfather, Giuseppe. Could Mary be his grandchild or great grandchild? For Mary to be Mom's full 2nd cousin, she'd have to be Giuseppe's great grandchild. I can't rule this out, so I'll leave the cell alone.

That leaves me with 1 more cell: half 1st cousin 1 time removed, with a common ancestor of Giuseppe Sarracino. But Giuseppe can't be Mary's grandfather because of the enormous age difference. I crossed out this cell.

I've eliminated all but the full 2nd cousin relationship. How would this relationship work? I took a look at my 2nd great grandfather, Giuseppe Sarracino. Giuseppe Sarracino married my 2nd great grandmother in December 1864. I can name 5 of their sons, born between 1865 and 1879. But I can't guarantee there were no other children.

Giuseppe had a habit of not reporting his childrens' births. By law, Italian citizens had to report births and deaths promptly.

But my great grandfather's 1876 birth went unreported until 1898. I found it completely by chance. They didn't report my 2nd great uncle Angelo's 1865 birth until 1894. And I've never found my 2nd great uncle Domenico's approximately 1866 birth record.

There's a gap from 1869–1875 during which Giuseppe could have had a daughter named Maria Grazia.

I wish I could add Maria Grazia Sarracino as a child of my 3rd great grandparents with a dotted line. I may never be able to prove she belongs there. But thanks to DNA probabilities, at least I have good reason to believe she is my 2nd great aunt.

I'm eager to try this method on more mystery DNA matches. I'll add a new spreadsheet tab for each person I want to put to the test. If figuring out potential relationships leaves your head spinning, give this a try.

And speaking of DNA:

• Let a DNA Match Guide Your Research for a While
• Help Your DNA Match Expand their Family Tree
• Is This the End of DNA Matches?

How to Tie Up Loose Ends in Your Family Tree

Here's how my combo of genealogy tools is tying up a long list of loose ends.

I'm ready to place almost every 19th century inhabitant of Grandpa's town into my family tree. Then it's on to each of my other ancestral hometowns.

Here's how I'm bringing all my obsessive processes together in one genealogical symphony.

Get yourself armed with knowledge and ready to find the documents you're missing.

Instrument 1: Vital Records

I've downloaded vast collections of Italian vital records from my ancestors' hometowns. They're arranged on my computer by province, then by town. For each town I have individual folders for:

• each year's birth records
• each year's death records, and
• each year's marriage records.

This simplifies searching.

Instrument 2: File Naming

It didn't take as long as you'd think to rename each image file, adding the subject's name. This is a birth record image containing 2 facing pages: 101577262_00006.jpg. I want to keep that number because it identifies the URL of the original file online. But I want to add the names of the 2 babies shown in the image. So I renamed the file 101577262_00006 Donato Petoscello & Maria Carmela Basile.jpg.

When the last name is important in my family, I include the subject's father's name. That helps me locate the right document faster. For example, 101577262_00020.jpg became 101577262_00020 Maria Teresa Pozzuto di Francesco & Giuseppantonio Zeolla di Giovanni.jpg. The "di" is Italian for "child of" and a handy shorthand.

Instrument 3: Document Tracker

As my family tree grew, I wanted an easy way to see which documents I had and didn't have for any given person. I made a document tracker spreadsheet. It's part of my process to record each document I find in the spreadsheet.

I labelled the last column "Need to find." That's where I keep list which documents I'm missing for each person in the list. It doesn't include everyone in my tree—only those with a document I found.

Instrument 4: Everything

This PC program is my new genealogy secret weapon. (Mac users may want to try NeoFinder.) It gives me Everything I need to locate any re-named document image on my computer.

Conducting the Orchestra

My process is this:

• Go through my document tracker, focusing on names from my grandfather's town.
• Find people who are missing a vital record: birth, marriage, or death.
• Search for the missing document with the Everything program.
• If found, add the document to the family tree and mark it as complete in the document tracker.
• If not found, mark it as "out of range" in the document tracker.

Here's an example:

Prepare for your search by gathering the necessary clues.

• Angelo Rosario Gregorio Basile was born in Colle Sannita on 1 Oct 1876. I have his birth record. He married twice. A clerk wrote the marriage dates and his wives' names on his birth record. Both marriage records (1896 and 1919) are out of the range of available records. It's his death record I want to find.
• Experience tells me his death record will not have his full name: Angelo Rosario Gregorio Basile. I need to know which name he used. I have the 1933 marriage record for his daughter. It says her father is Angelo Basile, and he's still alive. So I need a death record for an Angelo Basile who died in 1933 or later. (The death records in the collection end in 1942.)
• I use my new favorite program, Everything, to search for "Angelo Basile". I sort the results by the Path column so I can look only for a death record between 1933 and 1942.
• There are 3 choices. The first one is no good because his father is Donato. I'm looking for the son of Giovannantonio.
• The next death record, from 1940, is Angelo Basile, the son of Luigi. That's the wrong man.
• The final death record, from 1941, is Angelo Basile, the son of Giovanni (gasp!). His mother was Maria Franza. And his 2nd wife was Angelamaria Basile. This is, in fact, the death record I needed for Angelo Rosario Gregorio Basile.
• Now I can:
  
  • add the facts to my family tree
  • crop the image
  • annotate the image
  • add it to my tree, and
  • create a source citation
• Then I can update Angelo in my document tracker. His final note is "out of range: marriages" because they are not available. I hope they will be in the future. If this were his last missing document, I would put "n/a" in his "Need to find" column.

This victory inspires me to continue down the list. Combining (1) renamed vital record files, (2) the Everything program, and (3) my document tracker, I'll close the book on everyone from this town. Eventually.

If you aren't as obsessive about your entire ancestral town as I am, read on.

If you decide to use a document tracker, you'll know what you have and what you're missing for everyone in your family tree. In 2019 I searched for missing census records for all the Americans in my family tree. That focus helped me close the book on many families.

Go through your people alphabetically or by document type. Search for every missing census sheet or ship manifest or draft registration card. Take the time to do another search, and you'll have several successes.

I'm obsessed with my Italian towns, so I'm focusing on one town at a time. I will document all my towns, given enough time. And that, my friends, is my symphony of genealogy tools reaching its crescendo.