My RM DB is fairly large, 11,600 names. Because it goes back so far I seem to have quite a large number of women who have lost their maiden names. My solution to handling these ladies is to use their married names, in all caps, bracketed in parentheses, ie. (VELEZ). I used Reunion. for a while, but happily moved to RM8, but Reunion when alphabetizing by last name ignored the non alpha symbols. Can RM do this? How do other users handle these lost ladies?
I simply use a string of underscores for the wives surname, i.e. ______. It shows me that I don’t know their maiden name and it leaves some space in reports if I print them to give to other people to add missing info for me. You can always add an alternate name to them using their husbands surname to distinguish between multiple Mary _____.
Thank you for sharing your technique … it is very similar to what I use!
No, RM sorts the Index by the entire string so you will see all the “(…)”'s before the “A…”'s.
Ah, okay. How do you handle the ladies with no last names?
I leave unknown surnames blank. It’s best for search engines and hinting. If you don’t want to see the missing surname alert go to Settings, General Settings, click on Problem Options and uncheck Missing Surname and Missing Given names. Only turn it on when you want to look for someone missing one.
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…and then be flooded with all the Alternate Names along with Primaries that are surname empty. A filter control to show only Primaries would be good.
Are you clear that you should be entering an alternate name of type married? These will be in the index and thus easily found.
I’d also suggest that the primary surname be left blank when there is a perfectly good alt name.
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