Alternate Name for married name

RootsMagic
1

Does anyone use Alternate Name to capture a woman’s married name(s)? I’m often trying to identify a woman in estate or probate records where her current married name is listed. Given that women in the 1700’s often remarried multiple times, this can become daunting.

Since you can associate a date with a name field, I’m wondering if this is a more efficient way of finding the right woman?

2

I use Alternate Name with date so when I am researching I know what name to look for. Had a woman marry & live in a town for 20yrs. Husband died, she remarried and moved. That husband died so she moved back to original town and used her FIRST married name again cause people knew her by it LOL

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I don’t use alternate names for married women–typically in my case, I will run across an obit or news article that gives the married names of the girls–some say Mrs Charles Williams—which is great IF you only have 1 daughter BUT typically I have more than 1 and all are married to someone else— others say Lena Ross–which is easier to figure out UNLESS you don’t have a dau Lena–in the case of Lena, I would just add a hubby with the last name Ross-in the case of Mrs Charles Williams, you have to either wait or work around it…

BUT in your case where you are dealing with a large amount of facts NOT in your database yet-- I would add the new married name with an approximate date as an Alternative name and then add him as a hubby also as I think eventually you will come across something else to figure out the right person…

After the death of her 1st hubby my g-grandmother remarried and divorced between 1910 and 1920 taking back her married name after the divorce–none of her grandkids and their descendants ( us) knew that as she was married again as she was listed as Emma Steel in 1910 and 1920…

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I’ve been using the Alt Name of type “married” forever. Starting in my old project manager- TMG.
I include the date when that name was first used (usually marriage date)

5

Thanks everyone for your perspectives. I’m going to start using Alternate names like this.

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Also, for anyone wanting to do the same, I found the perfect script on @TomH’s excellent site: Names – Add Married #names #alternatenames #marriage #spouse – SQLite Tools for RootsMagic

I changed the script to keep the wife’s given name rather than replace with the husband’s. This works better for my approach.

Thanks, Tom!

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So this has been working great; really helps find women under all their married names. IF I have a Marriage event for the couple. However, I have hundreds of couples for which I don’t have a marriage event because I don’t yet have a date. So these women don’t get the Alternate Name created.

Question: should I create a Marriage event for couples that don’t have one just with no date? Or, would it be better (cleaner) to modify my script to add Alternate Names based on FamilyID rather than Marriage event?