

You know what means, whereas isn’t so clear - is that Aug. To avoid any potential confusion, they also use the month’s abbreviation (Melnyk suggests putting it in capital letters) instead of a numeral. Format dates as day, month, full year.įor consistency, genealogists write dates European-style, flip-flopping the American convention of month, day, year. If you don’t know a woman’s maiden name, note that with a question mark or simply skip the surname. Since you’re recording your female ancestors right next to their husbands, including their married names is redundant. List women’s maiden names, not their married names. This is especially useful for kin whose nicknames don’t relate at all to their real names, such as my uncle Everett “Butch” Smith. Always record nicknames, denoting them in quotation marks.Īgain, you want to show your ancestors’ full identities, so you can match up family history to the right relative. For example, my great-great-grandpa Charles George Michael Hauck was known to all as Michael, and that’s how he shows up in most US records. Remember, too, that some people went by their middle names. Naturally, this helps you distinguish Grandpa William Randolph Reynolds from Grandpa William Robert Reynolds. If you know middle names, spell them out. At first, this might seem unnecessary - but when you run into kin named Guillaume GAUTIER de LACHENAYE, Sebastiano Giovanni DI CARLO and the like, you can see the importance.

The all-caps approach lets you (or someone reading your charts) immediately distinguish last names from first and middle names. Family Tree Templates and Relationship Chartsįamily Tree Magazine 1.Best Genealogy Websites for Asia and the Pacific.Best Geography and Historical Map Websites.Best African American Genealogy Websites.Best US and Canadian Genealogy Websites.Surnames: Family Search Tips and Surname Origins.Preserving Old Photos of Your Family History.
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How to Find Your Ancestor’s US Military Records.
