Genealogy Chat

My son's tree on his father's side is throwing up some interesting challenges.

One of his cousins married a Malaysian lady and I was about to enter her name into my FTM database when I realised I was unsure which was her first name and which was her maiden name. I'm not even sure whether the middle name is part of the first name or surname.

I did google for clues and found this link which gave me further insight into the issue.
http://www.bidayuh.com/article/messages/78.html

It brought back memories of when I worked for an insurance office where nobody seemed sure of how to enter Chinese names onto the database. Needless to say, those records had a nasty habit of disppearing.

Hi Tracey, interesting site, but it did seem confusing to understand! My daughter in law is Thai and when I asked for her full name to add to the family tree she gave me two very long names which didn´t bear any resemblance to her name at all! They both looked like surnames to me, she said that babies are given an extra name after the first thing the mother sees after giving birth, fortunately my granddaughter is called Three Trees as there were 3 trees outside of the hospital window and not something less desirable!

Yes, confusing isn't it!

At my school there were 2 Chinese sisters. Their names followed the pattern of A-B-C and A-B-D. Both, however, were known as A-B, distinguished only by having "big" and "little" in front. I never understood why they diddn't use C and D if that was those were their personal names.

Does anyone else have any experience of entering foreign name patterns onto their trees?