Women- which name to use?

[Rae36]

I'm most interested in the women in my family tree. But there's never much to find out about the women. My family for generations back on all sides were pretty poor working class women raising families in quite poor situations.
My 2x great grandmother for example raised 11 children in a 1 bedroom row house while her husband worked as a miner. Imagine that. So pretty tough and impressive women but the records about them are limited to census records and records of births, marriages and deaths. A few of them have occupations before they're married but really nothing much at all. Apart from their names.

You tend to get a bit more info about the men because they had jobs or they might be shown on property valuation records or whatever. Not so much the women.

I have this notion that I'd like to do an embroidery or a picture with all their names. All of the women who have led to me. Because that's all I really know.

Would you use their birth names or their married names? I'm not sure. I kind of switch between both despite being happily married for 20 years. I just don't really like the sound of my married name, it doesn't suit my accent or my background very well. My gran would identify most with her birth name, my mum with her married name.

Of course I have no way of knowing which name my ancestors liked best. I have no idea if they had a good childhood and shit marriage or the other way around. So I have to pick one method or another to be consistent. What would you choose?

I guess if I decide to put my birth name on then that's me decided for everyone so we're all the same? But some women were married at 16 so had their married names for the most part of their lives.

I'm over-thinking, right? Someone please tell me what to do :)

Birth names. Those were their surnames; they only later adopted those of their husbands. You don't know how they felt about that, positive or negative. But their married names, as the names of their husband, are more likely to be remembered: if you don't commemorate and keep track of their birth names and more generally, the names of the women in your family line, they will disappear.

Birth names.

In every branch of my family tree I eventually hit a brick wall with the woman because I don't know her birth name. They need to be preserved.

I love the idea of your embroidery by the way!

I think that for each woman I would do her forename large and prominent, with both her birth name and her married name as small as you can manage.whilst still legible - her forename is the name that is truly hers, the surnames are just signifiers of which man is supposedly controlling her at different points in her life, but given the whole patriarchy thing it's a useful identifier.

Definitely birth names.

Agree, birth names.
It's a lovely idea to commemorate them.
I have thought about having a tattoo with my ancestors names.

Their birth name will of course be their father's surname (unless born out of wedlock), but you can carry on backwards using women's maiden names, which you do when drawing up a family tree anyway.

I think both - maiden and married - because that gives you the link from mother to daughter.

Were any married more than once?

I would go for birth name, partly for the reasons Precipice gives, but also because if someone married more than once, it means you can be consistent.

I don't know if that applies to your ancestors, but even if it doesn't currently you may find in the future another ancestor (I don't know if you've done as much genealogy as you're intending to do, but I find that I periodically go back to it and manage to chip away at a brick wall and add a few names).

I love the idea of the embroidery/picture to commemorate them, as I also regret that I can find less information about my female ancestors. Having said that, one of them brought up 10 children after her husband killed himself whilst she was pregnant with the youngest, and ran then ran the farm for 20 years. I'm in awe of her strength of character.

Birth names.

Alison Light’s book Common People is fascinating in how she fleshes out the lives of her ancestors who left little information behind them.

In family history you record the woman's name as was given at birth. You subsequently annotate who she married. But for the purposes of clarity as you move further back, you use the maiden surname of women. eg:

Mary Grant = John Jones
Their daughter is Ann Jones
Ann Jones = Fred Brown
Their daughter is Louisa Brown
Louisa Brown = George Smith.
Their daughter is the OP - @Rae36 Smith

If you don't stick with the maiden surname it can get messy.

Oh well that's unanimous then. Decision made.

Thanks for the book recommendation, I'll look that up. I've been able to find old photos of the houses some of my ancestors lived in, some photos of schoolkids in raggy clothes and bare feet at the ironworks school, almost certainly I'll have an ancestor in the photos but I'll never know for sure. But it does help me understand a bit more about what their lives would have been like.

i started out wanting to find some "remarkable" person who had done amazing things and was slightly disappointed not to find anyone.

But I've had a rethink and now consider that some of my women ancestors raising kids and keeping them alive in truly dire circumstances are remarkable in their own way.

Why not do "Firstname Marriedname nee Birthname"

It's the married name that is the connection between all these women, after all. Seems wrong to ignore it.

It is always the birth name especially as in some areas women never took their husbands' names.

The genealogical convention is always to use the name someone was born with.

I agree with birth names, especially as some women would have married twice or even more times. Then you would have to decide which married name.