I need to use uppercase for names in legal documents. For a compound surname such as DeBruin, is it capitalized as DEBRUIN or DeBRUIN (and why?).
It’s done whatever way you prefer, as long as you use it consistently.
Logically, since the “ruin” in DeBruin is capitalized, then the “e” should be also. But you don’t have to stick to logic.
IANAL but I doubt there is any general rule about this. If you have not been told to use a particular style guide (or if it does not address this issue), can’t you just ask the person who told you to do the capitalizing?
Personally I would prefer DeBRUIN for readability, but I do not know why you have have been told to capitalize the whole name in the first place. (You are sure they did not just mean the initial letters, are you?)
What about names that normally begin in lowercase, like de’Sperati and ffytche, I wonder (both real examples I have come across - one Italian and one British).
If you are working for a firm, then you need to ask what their preferred style is.
If you’re an individual with some documents you need to fill, check to see if they contain a contact number for asking questions.
If all else fails, go with all caps. They are probably using some kind of OCR software that recognizes capital letters, so not including any lower case lettering is safer.
In English, I would say capitalize all the letters. In other languages, there may be different rules for understanding the components of the name, but by the time it gets to us it’s a single word, albeit one with internal capitalization. For example, your “De” is a preposition, but in other two-capital names such as the “Mc-” and “Mac-” ones, the first element is a noun and should definitely be capitalized.
The only problem would be that going from all caps to title case, you wouldn’t be able to predict the internal capital. This seems unlikely to come up in your case.
I would guess there is some sort of style guide that handles this. Is there a legal writing resource you can consult? I guess without knowing anything else, if the instructions say last names must be typed in all caps, and no exceptions are listed, then all caps it is. I personally prefer the DeBRUIN method because it preserves the most information, so logically that’s defensible. But then you get into edge cases like “de’Sparati” and such which, if preservation of information is the goal, “de’SPARATI” would be the logical choice, but then “ffytche” would end up as “fFYTCHE” which just looks dumb (but are there really surnames that really always are printed with the initial letter lowercase? I’m not talking about stuff like e.e. cummings, where it’s an artistic choice and, besides, E.E. Cummings is also used and accepted.)
I remember in high school running into a similar problem in yearbook where the names for photos came in all caps printed on a dot matrix printer and the apostrophes were eliminated in them. Most of the surnames made it into the yearbook fine, but I do remember at least one surname, Ogarek, which became “O’Garek” because the editor, after a string of Irish names, just assumed it was Irish.
A space, at least, would have helped there. Same issue with the “Mac” names. Some wrote it “MacAllister,” some “Macallister” and there was no way of knowing with all capitals and no spaces.