Write your own name

At work, one of the frequent annoyances I have to deal with is people not letting people write their own names. The offenders are people collecting records (frequently in the form of oral histories). The victims are the ones donated their history to us. And the collectors routinely decide what the donor should be called*--deciding what name they go by, that they automatically take their husbands name, or only use their father's last name**, and also how that name is spelled, and write it all down for them, as though the collectors are somehow too dumb to write their own name. It drives me nuts and is something so easy to fix: Let them write their own name.

But today, I realized--with incredible despair--that this is not a new problem. See, I have this line in my family history where there's a Joseph Cook, with no known parents. And a wife whose name is either Lavicia, Levitha, or Tabitha??? And is legitimately written in all of those ways on multiple government documents. And why? Because some schumpter wrote their name for them, and didn't bother to ask how they spelled it or even verify that they knew what it actually was. For the love of sanity. And there is not a single document that shows her non-married name (at least none that has surfaced yet).

Which apart from causing massive problems for family history research, it's also just rude. I mean, the very barest minimum acknowledgement that someone is a person is to get their name right. Poor Tabitha-Lavicia-Levitha!*** 

Anyway, pro tip: Let people write their own names. Or at least ask them how they spell their name. And bare minimum, make sure you know what it actually is. History will thank you.

*There is an exception, and I have had to make this exception. We have--on a rare occasion--been dealing with people who couldn't write their name. But I ALWAYS ask them what name they want written down. Many of our collectors don't. They assume they are smart enough to know.

**I work with people from Latin America, so they inherit both the mother's and father's last names. Dad's first, then Mom's. But, this is also an issue with English names, and it baffles me that we think that because we speak English, we know how names work. I know lots of women who never did the paperwork to change their name after marriage (mostly, I hear, because it is a pain in the neck). And I have had to fix situations where someone described the person with their first name, when it was written all over in the records that they use their middle name. People know who they are. Just ASK them!!!

***Although, in fairness, maybe she didn't care. Maybe she is happy to be off the grid. Maybe it worked out great for her, and she became a train robber that no one could identify because they kept getting her name wrong. Who am I to say?