It’s important to follow genealogical standards when writing down and sharing your research, including how to properly record names, dates, and locations. This is to prevent errors in your own research, to allow researchers to find your sources, and to easily collaborate with other researchers now or in the future.
How many times have you come across a birth date in an Ancestry.com profile as something like 2/10/1980 and were unsure if they mean the tenth of February or the second of October? Or perhaps you recorded the date as the former, only to realize later the latter was correct. Or let’s say you’ve inherited your Aunt’s research, and she lists your great-grandmother’s first name as “Nelly” and you don’t realize this is a nickname. It takes you a lot of frustrating searches before you learn her given name is actually “Ellen”. If everyone who practiced genealogy followed the same set of standards, problems like the examples above could be easily avoided.
Genealogists widely use The Chicago Manual of Style for both citations and formatting in our research. See our guide to Citing Sources for help with the citation part. They also rely on Genealogy Standards by the Board for Certification of Genealogists (BCG) and works by professional genealogist and author Elizabeth Shown Mills, CG, CGL including Evidence Explained: Citing History Sources from Artifact to Cyberspace. In addition to her many influential publications, Mills was the president of both the Board for Certification of Genealogists and the American Society of Genealogists, and editor of the National Genealogical Society Quarterly. We strongly encourage you to read these works.
We’ve shared below our own basic guidelines for formatting names, dates, and locations based on a combination of our understanding of the works named above, other works we’ve come across (cited beneath), and our own personal preferences. Please note these are only suggestions and are not officially agreed upon by any professional organizations.
Like with citations, the most important thing is to be consistent throughout your own work. For example, if you decide to capitalize the whole surname, do this for all names in your research notes. And if you are writing for a publication be sure to follow their own set of instructions and style guides.
| Name Standards | Example |
|---|---|
| Write names in their normal order: given name, middle name, surname | Dorothy Eileen Cook |
| Always record a female with her maiden surname | Dorothy Eileen Cook | If a given name is unknown leave it blank, but if the surname is unknown use a question mark between dashes, within brackets | _____ Cook or Dorothy [-?-] |
| If they used a nickname, put the nickname in quotation marks after their first name |
William "Bill" Henry Rogers |
| Never include anything other than the name in the name field | Dorothy Cook (not Dorothy Cook 1132) |
| Do not include military or professional titles in the name, but include in parentheses | Edward Jones (a.k.a. Colonel Edward Jones) |
| Record the name as it was at the time of the event, in the language and spelling of the time | Lysbeth Rogiers (instead of Elizabeth Rogers) |
| Record multiple spelling variations with earliest known usage or spelling first | Lysbeth Rogiers (Elizabeth Rogers) |
| Include notations in brackets to explain or add more information, only the first time the name appears this way in your research notes or report | Mary Rogers [Rogers her maiden name and also the last name of her husband] |
| It is not necessary to capitalize the surname any longer, instead use mixed case | Mary Rogers (not Mary ROGERS) |
| Date Standards | Example |
| Abbreviate months with the first three letters, without a period | Jan, Feb, Mar, Apr, May, Jun, Jul, Aug, Sep, Oct, Nov, Dec |
| Use the day month year format, or DD Mon YYYY, when listing dates. Use a zero if the day is a single digit so no one wonders if part of the date is missing or illegible. | 10 Jul 1983 09 Jul 1983 |
| If birth date unknown and other date or estimate used, always specify with an abbreviation, no punctuation or periods. Leave off month or date if unknown. | bap 06 Sep 1904 est Sep 1904 abt 1904 |
| Double dating - in 1752, the calendar changed from Old Style (Julian) to New Style (Gregorian). You may see English and colonial records reference a date before 1752 as OS or old style, or give a date with a backslash like 1692 / 3, for OS / NS. | 1619 OS 1753 NS 1752 / 3 |
| Know when to use which terms and abbreviations (see below): | |
| about = within a year or two | about 1754 |
| circa = a general time frame or estimate, usually used on photo captions only |
ca. 1854 circa 1850's |
| estimated = a guess based on certain data | est. 1920 |
| calculated = if you knew the exact date of death and how old they were to the day, you could calculate the birth date | calc. 10 Jul 1982 |
| before = you know there was a time they had to have died by, like if their spouse was listed as a widow on a census | bef. 1986 |
| between = narrowed down estimate between two dates | betw. 1986 - 1988 |
| from = between two dates, with the first being the date the event started in and the latter the time the event concluded | from 1931 - 1932 |
| Location Standards | Example |
| Always record the name of the location at the time the event took place - even if the boundaries or names have changed since then. Don’t use any qualifiers like “was” or “formerly”, but you can add notes in brackets giving the updated name of the location. | New Netherland [now Brooklyn, Kings County, New York] |
| Record the location names with the smallest name in size first to the biggest last, such as: City, County, State, Country | Windham, Rockingham County, New Hampshire, USA or: Windham, Rockingham County, New Hampshire |
| Always spell out the names except for The United States of America, which should be either “USA” or “United States”. | |
| It’s generally accepted to leave off the country if listing locations in states | |
Additional References:
Board for Certification of Genealogists, Genealogy Standards. (2nd ed.). Nashville, TN.: Ancestry, 2019.
Mills, Elizabeth Shown. Evidence Explained: Citing History Sources from Artifacts to Cyberspace. (3rd ed). Revised. Baltimore, Md..: Genealogical Publishing Co., 2017.
The Chicago Manual of Style (17th ed.). Chicago, Ill.: University of Chicago Press, 2017.
See also : Abbreviations, our guide to Citing Sources