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Archiver > TMG > 2002-10 > 1033657685


From: Linda Gaylord-Kuhn <>
Subject: RE: [TMG] Data Entry of Women with Unknown Maiden Names
Date: Thu, 03 Oct 2002 10:08:09 -0500
In-Reply-To: <5.1.0.14.2.20021003073514.0266b908@pop3.norton.antivirus>


Ruth Cattles Cottrell wrote:
>In my clean up I've been rethinking how I entered married women with
>unknown maiden names. I'm interested in hearing how others do it.

Because I have many ancient people in my database that never had surnames, I
like to distinguish them from more recent ones who did have surnames. When
I've determined there was no surname, I simply leave the surname blank.
However if I know, say, Mrs. Sarah MOORE *must* have had a surname, I record
her surname as "(U) MOORE" - the "(U)" denoting maiden name unknown. The
reason I do this is to make my index more useful; all the Sarahs without
maiden names will sort in the order of their married names:

(U) EDWARDS
Mary
Sarah
Veronica
(U) MOORE
Abigail
Frances
Sarah
(U) VINCENT
Charlotte
Sally
Sarah

I prefer this to the following:

UNKNOWN SURNAME
Abigail
Charlotte
Frances
Mary
Sally
Sarah
Sarah
Sarah
Veronica



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