#1133 Capitalize all surnames

[Susan Chambless]

I would find it very helpful if there was an option to capitalize surnames, perhaps automatically on entry of a new person and a maintenance function to capitalize surnames that already exist. I am trying to do this manually, but lapse.

[Greg Roach]

Complexities that need to be considered are:

Prefixes are not normally capitalised, even when the name is capitalised. e.g. "de CLITHEROE".

Some names are conventionally written with some lower case letters, evn when capitalised. e.g. "McDONALD"

Also, are you asking for the names to be forced to upper case in the gedcom file, or just displayed as upper case on the screen?

[Wes Groleau]

Not a good idea, in my opinion.
If you were writing an obituary, would you say "Plainsfield resident Emma Jo MCCOY passed away yesterday..." ?
You're writing to your Mom: "Hey, remember David TOMKIEWICZ? He just moved down the street from me."
How about John van de Graaf ? If you upper case the whole thing, you're withholding information from the reader on how to spell it. Should that 'v' be a 'V' ?
If you think people won't be able to figure out what is the surname, use bold, or underscore, or italics.
Maybe there could be an admin option for an HTML tag to put before and after the surname. Defaulted to NONE.