To wonder how genealogists will fare in the future...

[jemenfous37]

...given the new norms of not taking husband's surname (after marriage), not getting married, and allocation of random surnames - by which I mean biological father or partner of the moment, or mother's - to children (even between brothers and sisters)
Tracing a family tree would be almost impossible

Given we had had electronic birth, marriage and death records for some many decades now, I suspect they’ll be absolutely fine.

I would have thought it would be easier. Better records, easier access via the internet, not having lots of people with the same to shift through.

DF did his family tree and we got stuck in the 1800s by John and Mary Smith.

I have an ancestor of about 100 years ago who is given his mother’s name and then they move to another town and it is changed to her new husband’s. It’s nothing new.

As opposed to routinely losing track of the female line? Was that better? I would think more people double-barrelling, for example, would be a bit of a gift. Better records and a greater variety of first names seems like it would help a lot too.

They used to confuse matters bu giving their children the same name as a deceased child. Oops Sarah’s died let’s call the new baby Sarah. And again. And again. And now let’s change the way we spell our surname.

They're also talking about doing away with the census which will be a real shame.
On the flip side, more and more other records of daily life will be digital and easy to put online, so perhaps that will be a positive; but if you don't have official records to say who your ancestors were living with, you're right, I think it might die a death as a hobby.

Three words OP.
D
N
A

And yeah, given the number of maternal deaths in childbirth in olden days there were a fair number of more complicated families. Not to mention the fact that the children of unmarried girls were often informally adopted within the family with no real paper trail. One family member from the early 20th century was actually the child of his father's mistress but brought up by his father and his wife.

And the families where the son is called William or John for generations, and with less mobility you are more likely to get relations with the same surname also called William or John and living in the same village.

When I got married they asked for my father's name to put on the certificate. Given I was in my fifties and estranged from him anyway I asked why it needed to be there and they said it's simply to be able to trace family trees in future.

YABU. From experience, it's easier to trace family lines if you have a woman's maiden name. Which isn't always available on historical sources. The more hints there are to other related surnames, the more leads you have to go on.

When DH and I got married this was asked of both of us too which was weird for us. DH's dad had died 5 years before and I am also estranged. We got our mothers to act as witnesses so there was a record of them too.

I got my family tree back to 16th century on one branch which got increasingly hard due to the high number of Sarahs and Johns. I had to abandon what I thought was a more promising branch (more unusual surname) because the name became so concentrated in a particular region and there were too many Richards and Johns that it became much harder to find. I ended up looking at matrilineal lines instead because the female names were often easier to distinguish from their mothers or cousins

There's electronic records of everything now, so it will be a lot easier. There's also DNA databases. You haven't thought it through.

I've even encountered 17th century records that say "William Osborne was married " no mention of his wife. There follows a series of baptisms, son, daughter of said William Osborne, followed by a death, "wife of William Osborne".
At no time was the poor woman's name recorded.
I've also frequently come across deaths where the dead woman is named as Widow Surname, again, no first name recorded.

DNA will give bloodline but not necessarily family line. It depends on what you want to follow.

Does it matter if people raised as full siblings were in fact half siblings? Mother has an affair, gets pregnant, resulting child is raised as husband's child maybe knowingly, maybe unknowingly.

Genealogists should be fine.

Archaeologists, on the other hand, will be fucked.

It’s the epigraphers I feel sorry for. Hardly any records are carved in stone these days.

Yeah, we should totally stick with patriarchal norms of the sake of family tree tracing.

And what everyone else said.

OK, everyone! Thank you for your replies so far

Obviously, I posited a stupid point of view!

I agree. 'Non-standard' (for want of a better description) changes of name are nothing new. I had a relative who separated from her husband but never divorced (I believe divorce laws made it more difficult then) so could not marry her next partner but just started to use his last name when they had children. I doubt that there is any official reference to this anywhere so it may well confuse future generations looking at their family tree. Now that it's easier to officially change names there will be proper records.

I don't think it was a stupid point of view at all.

It actually poses an interesting question. All the new records available plus DNA may blow quite a few carefully curated family trees out of the water.

Not so much a tree more a rambling rose!

A lot of family trees are predicated on the assumption that X is a child of the marriage of A & B. If A & B aren't married and X has a different surname from either A or B then who is X?

With records now digitised from the off it'll be easy. No more relying on transcripts. I imagine there will be AI where you enter your birth details, it scans everything and within seconds you have a fully populated family tree.

What will be fascinating is being able to put the meat on the bones thanks to the internet. I guess social media won't exist in its current forms but will be archived, and genealogists will be able to find out so much about their ancestors' lives. Countless photos, what their interests were, the absolute minutae.

I agree with you as well OP.

For those who say DNA - that assumes that the childs paternal father or one of his family have been tested and made their test results available on a commercial site such as Ancestry, not that many people have! DNA testing might be used for establishing paternity for other reasons, but genealogy is not one of them.

As others have pointed out, it is nothing new, but it does seem to be becoming more common and will make things more difficult.

OP I have wondered this too and I don't think it's a silly question at all

The general thought seems to be computers will take over and genealogy as we know it will become a thing of the past. But surely they'll only be able to go back so far.. DNA records don't exist for the entire population.. no where near.

I've been researching my family tree for a few years now.

The dead ends I have reached have almost all been down to the woman taking her husband's name on marriage.

Back as far as 1837 when civil registration came in, it is usually possible to look up what a baby's mother's birth name was, although sometimes it isn't listed or is spelled incorrectly. But before that, unless you can find parish marriage records showing what the woman's birth name was, you hit a dead end. All you know is that Jane Smith's parents were called John and Mary Smith, which means you can generally go no further back in the maternal line. Looking for a Mary Ann in East London with only an approximate age is like looking for a needle in a haystack.

It's much easier searching French records and even some Scottish parish records where the mother's birth name is also given.

A lot of what we think we know about our ancestry needs to be taken with a pinch of salt as well. I have an ancestor who was married three times, including once probably bigamously, who lied about her age the first time she got married and was listed under a different surname or even Christian name on each census and lied about being married/how long she had been married on at least two censuses. Tracing her was an absolute nightmare.

Then there's the fact that a child'a biological parent or parents might not have been who they supposedly were. Not just children who might have been fathered by a man other than the mother's husband, either due to infidelity or rape or due to the parents meeting after the child was born and pretending they were the father's biological child, but also illegitimate children being raised by grandparents. There are quite a few women in my family tree who supposedly had children well into their 40s when their eldest unmarried daughters were in their teens or early 20s. So most genealogy involves a certain amount of guesswork, and I would imagine that in most family trees going back more than a few generations there are people whose actual parents are not who we think they were and so everything earlier than that point is completely wrong.

These days we have compulsory registration of births, much less of a stigma about children being born "out of wedlock" so less incentive for people to lie, and of course DNA testing.