The Family Tree
By Terence L. Day
Terence L. Day, genealogist and journalist, is on the Washington State University faculty. He welcomes e-mail at genealogy@moscow.com, or regular mail in care of the Tri-City Herald City newsroom, P.O. Box 2608, Tri-Cities, WA 99302-2608.
Computers can create problems with names
This story was published April 26, 1998
Please don't tell my son Ben about this column. He's a computer software engineer and my diatribes against the sins of computer programmers cause him to display pained facial expressions.
But that's nothing compared with the soul-deep pain software engineers cause me with their irreverence for names.
It's bad enough that names are being desecrated in business records now kept in computers. But the disrespect is especially hard to swallow in software for genealogists, although I must admit genealogists themselves are at least partly to blame.
I'm speaking of the practice of printing names in all capital letters. There is no problem in capitalizing the surname, DAY. But when we get to Irish, Scottish and some other patronymics, big-time problems occur.
My genealogy is thus far little encumbered by Mac, Mc, O' and other patronymic prefixes. Patronyms are names that derive from one's father, as opposed to names that had their beginnings in occupations, geographical features, some notable personal characteristic or other source.
In Ireland, O' indicates grandson or merely descendant. The Scots, apparently, have not used the O' prefix.
Mac, and Mc prefixes are commonly encountered in Irish and Scottish genealogies. They indicate "son of." Thus my McKenzie ancestors derived from some son of Kenzie.
Please forgive the digression, but don't put stock in assertions that Mac is of Irish origin and Mc implies Scottish beginnings. Elsdon C. Smith, author of American Surnames, debunks the idea, noting some experts argue exactly the opposite.
You will find no shortage of Mac's and Mc's in Irish and Scottish genealogies. Smith says Mc is simply a shortening of Mac, and that Scots and Irish sometimes further abbreviate it to M'. Thus MacKenzies, McKenzies and M'Kenzies all are expressions of the same name.
Specific families, however, may have settled on one of those three spellings and the form can be used to distinguish between unrelated, or distantly related families.
Now come computers and software programs that give genealogists the option of printing surnames either in upper and lower case or all capital letters. Capitalizing all the letters in a surname helps genealogists keep some names straight. I have a friend whose first name is "Day." When it is printed in upper and lower case while his surname is printed in all capitals, there is no question which is his surname.
Similarly, I've known men whose first names were common surnames. The economist Smith Greg comes to mind. A careless genealogist encountering the name might render it Greg Smith, which would be misleading. Following the convention of capitalizing the surname, however, avoids confusion. Smith GREG is clear to any genealogist.
One of the reasons this convention is so popular is because at times it has been faddish to print surnames first in genealogical records. This would render the economist's name as Greg Smith. Again, GREG, Smith is clear to any genealogist. Some rely heavily on the comma, but commas can be elusive little characters.
The convention of putting surnames in all caps makes a lot of sense.
But doing so introduces other problems, and this is where I fault computer programmers. McKenzie becomes MCKENZIE. MacKenzie becomes MACKENZIE.
These constitute assaults on the Queen's English, although they aren't as bad as some other names on my family charts. MCCALL, MCCLELLAN AND VANORDEN are terrible.
It seems to me that software engineers could write the programs to express these names as McKENZIE, MacKENZIE, McCALL, McCLELLAN and van ORDEN.
I'm sorry I can't offer a better fix, but I enter these names in my computer software application with a space after the prefix: Mc KENZIE. There are reasons I probably shouldn't do this, including the fact that it can mess up the automatic alphabetization of my database and frustrate the search mechanism.
For instance, if I forget the space and ask the search engine to find MCKENZIE, it stops at MECHAM. But as long as I remember to include the space, it goes right to the first MC KENZIE in my database.
My practice may be problematic for genealogists exchanging databases. But it helps alleviate some of my frustration.