Hello! I’ve noticed when printing Individual Summary reports, alternate names do not have the ‘name type’ included on the printout. Is there a setting I’m missing somewhere? Appreciate the help!
I checked several people and they all show Alt.Name as the fact type in the left column with the alternate name on the right. Can you give some screen shots?
Yes, the Alt. Name fact and the name appear, but the Name Type is not. The first Alt. Name should indicate “married” and the second should indicate “alternate spelling”
No, that doesn’t show anywhere. .
Oh man, so Name Type doesn’t show ever for anything? Is it possible to make a feature request?
I think that the fact that support didn’t know what you were talking about when you referred to “Name Type” indicates how little the RM app supports it.
I also consider it important.
When I imported my project from TMG, none of the name type were carried over.
I’d be curious to see how TMG incorporated that into reports.
Yes, I think it’s very important! I’m disappointed to learn that while the field is there, it’s not utilized.
curious if that is accurate – maybe most places for most things - I have not tried using in sentences
Can you explain why this is please, I feel it is very important to know that a name is a married or birth name etc having “alternate name” isn’t really very helpful.
You can create a Fact to reflect that info - Alt Married Name or Alt Spelling Name (just use Alt Name as the layout for them)
Add a note to the alternate name. It will follow after the sentence for the alternate name. You can customize the alternate name sentence template to use a comma instead of a period so it becomes one sentence in the narrative report. On the Individual Summary it will show under notes.
For now I’ve created separate custom facts for married name and alternate name (usually pertaining to spelling in a different language or interchangeable first name usage [like Marianna/Maryanna/Maria]). I prefer these to be up with individual facts instead of underneath in notes (tried it as notes but really didn’t like it). One downside I found when looking through the forum is that you can’t search your database with these, but I don’t search my database with alt. names.
Just in case someone else finds this useful:
Married Name
In the description field I put the first name and married surname.
Custom sentence: She was known as [Desc] after her marriage. → She was known as Helena Broczkowska after her marriage.
Alternate Name
In the description field I put the first name, surname and a little descriptor like “in German” or “in some records” …whatever the case may be.
(ignore all the Residences in the screenshot - I haven’t cleaned it up from saved Ancestry records)
I might change the fact name to be more exact, like instead of Alternate Name have it actually say Other Name Spelling, Name (Other Language), or something. I haven’t played around with it yet to see what I like best.
Custom sentence: I haven’t figured out how to construct a template for this that doesn’t get wonky in narrative reports. I’ve tried “[Person]'s name was recorded as [Desc]”, but it would change to “He’s name was recorded…” in some instances. I prefer individual summary reports to the narrative ones so not a big deal for me at the moment, but it might be for someone else or future me lol.
Alt names aren’t actually “facts”. If you do create a fact type like that, the name won’t get in the index.
I understand your aim is to convey that a custom-designed fact IS less purposeful, than the “built-in” counterpart (Alternate Name) …by virtue of it having been designed into the GEDCOM spec and the programmers implementing metadata from it …for use in name-related indexing and the pre-existing, name-specific constructs of UI/reports/lists/ETC.
However, custom facts such as Alt Married Name or Alt Spelling Name seem to not only offer potential enhancement specifically to RootsMagic’s search/sortability (like name indexing) and display/output (like UI/reports/lists), but also can be expected to export reasonably well (these days) for varying limited use by competitor programs “worth their salt”.
Points taken.
I was coming at it from the database point of view.