Recording Names, Dates and Places the Right Way
Hospital town or hometown? Maiden name or married name? County then or county now? Simple conventions that keep your family tree clear, consistent and easy for others to use.
How you write down names, dates and places might seem like a small thing. But a tree with inconsistent entries is hard to search, easy to misread, and full of hidden mistakes. Genealogists have developed simple conventions that solve most of these problems. Here they are.
Names
- Record women by their maiden names. Mary Brown who married John Smith is entered as Mary Brown. Her married names are shown through her marriages. If you don't know her maiden name, leave the surname blank or enter a placeholder like "Mary (unknown)" rather than "Mary Smith," which looks like a maiden name.
- Use the name the person was given, spelled as in the earliest or most reliable record, and record other spellings and nicknames as alternate names. Note where each version appears.
- Don't "correct" spellings in transcriptions. Copy what the record says exactly, and add your notes separately.
- Keep titles and suffixes separate: put Jr., Sr., Rev. or Capt. in their own fields, if your software has them, so they don't become part of the surname.
Dates
- Use day, month, year with the month spelled out or abbreviated: 5 March 1852. The format 3/5/1852 is ambiguous; much of the world reads it as 3 May.
- Always use four-digit years.
- Mark estimates clearly: "about 1820" (abt.), "before 1850" (bef.), "after 1790" (aft.), or "between 1820 and 1825." Most genealogy software recognizes these.
- Record a calculated date as calculated: if a gravestone gives an age, enter the estimated birth date and note how you got it.
- Watch for Old Style dates before 1752 in British colonies. See Old Dates.
Places
Places are where trees get messiest. The most common question, and one of the most-viewed questions on WikiTree, is whether to record a birthplace as the hospital's town or the family's hometown.
Record the place where the event actually happened
The convention is to record the place of the event: if your mother was born in a hospital in the city, the city is her birthplace, even if the family lived on a farm 20 miles away. Note the family's home in a residence fact or a note. Records will generally list the hospital's town, so this keeps your tree consistent with the documents.
Record the place as it was then
Write places with the jurisdictions that existed at the time of the event, from smallest to largest: town, county, state, country. A birth in 1790 in what is now West Virginia happened in Virginia, so record it as "Harrison County, Virginia," not West Virginia. Many researchers add the modern location in a note or in brackets for clarity.
This matters for more than accuracy. The records are filed under the jurisdiction that existed then. If you record the modern county, you may look for records in the wrong courthouse. Use the Atlas of Historical County Boundaries to check.
Write places in full and consistently
- Include "County" (or "Parish" in Louisiana) to avoid confusion between a town and a county of the same name.
- Spell out states, or use one consistent format throughout.
- Use the same spelling every time, so your software groups events in one place correctly.
Sources: the most important field
Every fact should have a source: the record it came from. A source can be as simple as "1880 U.S. census, Clark County, Indiana, Jeffersonville, page 12, line 4, John Miller household." Without one, neither you nor anyone else can check the fact later. See Organizing Your Research.
Conflicting information
When two records disagree, don't just pick one. Record both, with their sources, and note which you think is more reliable and why. Most software lets you add multiple birth dates and mark one as preferred. See The Genealogical Proof Standard.