RootsMagic 7 offers no means of using an Alternate Name value in its sentence template language for events for any fact type other than Alternate Name. Some users want to use a wife’s married name (husband’s surname) for her events after Marriage, especially the end-of-life events as the married name is commonly recorded or engraved on headstones. Within RootsMagic, the only workarounds are to:
- customize each event sentence to incorporate the husband’s surname literally, not as a field,
or - share the event with the husband which then enables retrieval of the husband’s name in a custom default sentence.
Either way is labour intensive.
This script carries out the first workaround in a matter of seconds, applying a custom local sentence to each of the end-of-life events for a wife having a valid Marriage event. It does not touch the events of a person with no Marriage event nor one with a subsequent Annulment or Divorce event. A polygamist woman would take the name of the last groom. It ignores Alternate Names but perhaps that is a possible enhancement that would be desirable to accommodate name hybrids such as maidenname-husbandname.