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Help:Gender

The software makes it's best guess at gender by looking at the prefix field, but this can be overridden by setting the gender field to "M" or "F". The priority is:

First: gender field

|gender=M

or

|gender=F

Anything starting with an "M", lower or upper case denotes Male, anything starting with a lower of upper case "F" denotes Female. Anything else, or nothing at all, results in the software looking at the prefix field

Second: prefix field

/Mrs./Miss./Lady./Mme./Mlle/

result in gender being set to female. Anything else, including nothing, sets it to Male, the default.

The main reason to set gender in the gender field is for those cases where the prefix is Dr., General, Prof., etc...

Correct gender determination is used in the married vs. maiden name index generation and in the tree program for counting males vs. females.

The prefix field is also used to tell the difference between a woman who's surname is unknown who married vs. a daughter who didn't marry. For example Mrs. Elizabeth Haynes II vs. Miss Elizabeth Haynes I and Mrs. Elizabeth Moor née Haynes. Another complication are marriages between cousins,when the married and maiden names are the same, for example Alice St.John née St.John.

The following algorithm is used:

If prefix starts with Mrs or Mme

and the woman's father is unknown, use née Unknown in the person's page and (Unknown) in the index.

otherwise (the father is known), use née lastname and (lastname) respectively.

All the other cases are either female and not "Mrs", or male, in which case there's no née maiden name or (maiden name).