When do I use the maiden name type, and when do I use the birth name type?
“Maiden name” refers to the surname of a woman prior to getting married and taking the surname of the spouse.
“Birth name” is, most likely, synonymous with “Given name”, such as they would receive during a christening ceremony.
So for a woman who changed her last name through marriage, would I put the maiden name, so the one she was born with, under maiden or birth?
As far as I’m aware, RM doesn’t actually have a field called “Maiden name”. For name facts, it has two fields … “Given” and “Surname”.
I’ll use one of my ancestors as an example. One of my 2x great-grandmothers, at birth, had the name Mary Catherine Bruner. In general conversation, most people would consider her full name at that time to be considered her “maiden name”. However, on many official forms, when asked for a maiden name, it’s customary to just list the surname, i.e. “Bruner”.
Within RM, for the Primary Name fact, “Mary Catherine” is entered in the field called “Given” and “Bruner” is entered in the field called “Surname”.
Eventually, Mary Catherine married a man named Frank Shrauner, an immigrant from Switzerland.
Within RM, for a related alternate name fact, “Mary Catherine” is entered in the field called “Given” and “Shrauner” is entered in the field called “Surname”.
It might help if you can share a screen capture of where you’re seeing “maiden type” and “birth name type”.
Ahhh! I’ve never actually used that field before. You’ve given me something new to learn about!
The RM online help doesn’t seem to give good, clear guidance either. 
In the example you’ve given, if that’s the name she had from the time of her birth until the time of her marriage, then both labels technically apply.
Though I don’t use that labelling, if I were trying to decide then I would probably use “Birth”, regardless of gender.
1 Like
Flexibility in those name types come into play for circumstances such as multiple marriages, legal name changes, compound surnames with dash, ethnic multi-surnames (eg. French Canadian, Spanish/Latino, etc.)
1 Like
Generally people enter the birth name into RM so there is really no need to designate it as a maiden name. In your case, you need to figure out how you wish to enter female names, birth name or married name. In the former case, maiden name does no good, in the latter, then married does you no good. Both options are there to allow you flexibility in how you want to work with names. That doesn’t mean you need to use both.
1 Like
It seems to me that there is virtually no value in ever entering name types into the Primary Name fact. RM doesn’t actually use the name type for anything or otherwise do anything with it. The primary name that RM actually uses is the one you see when you highlight the Person line at the top of the Edit Person screen. And that primary name doesn’t support any of the name type options.
The Alternate Name fact does support name options But having entered such information into RM, RM doesn’t do anything with the data. You can’t search on the data or customize narrative reports based on the data or anything like that.
RM didn’t even support the Primary Name fact until RM8. But the only thing the Primary Name feature supports is the ability to swap an Alternate Name with the Primary Name. But the name types do not do much of anything, neither for Primary Names nor for Alternate Names. And if anything, the Primary Name is less significant than Alternate Names because it is subsumed into the primary name on the Person record.
1 Like
Like others of you, I never realized all those choices for names. I checked, and both RM7 and RM10 use the designation “given name” when one begins with a new individual.
I do find in researching online that people sometimes substitute the married surname for the given name. That causes confusion and is not considered standard practice.
I use alternate name when a family has widely divergent spellings of the surname between generations or even with closely related people. This helps in avoiding duplicate entries, at least in RM7. The feature appears to be removed in RM10 and I would miss it if I were doing data entry in RM10. It should be reinstated in my opinion.
For me there is nothing more frustrating than finding than I have entered an entire family twice using two different spellings of the surname.
For women who do not have a known surname and they married one or more times, I usually put the first married name in brackets, i.e. Mary [Ferguson]. I guess using an alternate name of Mary Ferguson would accomplish the same goal of giving her an identity. Bracketed surnames do sort in the index together before the regularly listed names in alphabetical order.
I don’t think there is any hard and fast rule on how to categorize names and the categories are only of some use to the researcher, not to an audience to whom you might publish. One might correlate the chosen category with the source type. Birth category with Birth record, Maiden with Marriage record… If both types of sources have the same name, then it’s a tossup which category to use, if any.
I personally find the term maiden name to be achronistic and I’d never use it given the availability of the category birth name .
Do unmarried women or women who don’t change their name at marriage even have maiden names?
Traditionally (historically speaking), a good number of women in Greece, France, Italy, Netherlands, Scandinavia, Japan, South Korea, China, Spanish-speaking countries, and some Islamic cultures traditionally retain(ed) their birth (maiden) names after marriage. None would seem to have any effect on Given+Surname entry.
Spanish cultures have the notion of maiden name (pellido de soltera -or- apellido materno) where mother’s surname supplants father’s. Alternate Names allow for some support towards types of variation …from colloquially “known as” all the way to recorded/(mis)transcribed/pronounced/reported as/adopted/legally changed and some other possibilities.
Similar to Set Relationship, these “hints” (~about~ entered data) are merely intended for the benefit of the user interface.
1 Like
I think in general Maiden name is the equivalent as Birth Name (maybe in some culture differences)
That I have found in many cases is the 2nd (or beyond) Marriage recorded will usually refer to them as the last known name (either to Widow or Divorce) not their original Maiden name. This get personal preference I think in most cases—
So is this why I have seen a lot of males before 1800 in parts of the US that was under French control had dit in their name such as Jones dit Smith?
Wikipedia’s Dit name article pretty succinctly covers that topic, but yes, it seems all about “conventions” of the time…during those times.
2 Likes
Toggling the choice of name for Web search might be useful.
I wonder what might happen with Hints should there be an ability to choose which name type to prioritize for a group.
I enter a woman’s birth surname in the Surname field. , whenever I know what it is. And I enter her married surname as an alternative name. However, I have many records where her birth surname is NOT known. In that case, I enter her married surname in the Surname field and append an asterisk to it. This allows the surnames to sort as expected, and easily identifies which name is birth and which is married.