Trouble with particles "de", "von", etc.

I've read through what I can find, but I'm still a little confused about how to enter names with dropping and non-dropping particles. I'm using CMS full-note with a bibliography and thus seeing three forms of each name ("First Last", "Last", and "Last, First"), but the behavior is similar in a few other styles I tried.

Right now I have two names entered like this:
Last: "Harnack", First: "Adolf von"
Last: "de Boor", First: "Carl"

According to an older forum post, if I understand correctly, I could instead enter "Adolf, von" for the parser to recognize the dropping particle, but doing so yields clearly wrong results ("Adolf Harnack von" in the first full note, and "Harnack, Adolf, von" in the bibliography). Just doing "Adolf von" seems to yield the right results, despite my hesitance to put part of the last name in the first name field, but is there any other downside?

As for "de Boor", I correctly get "Carl de Boor" in the first note and "De Boor, Carl" in the bibliography, but any note after the first begins "de Boor" despite being at the beginning of a sentence. For example,

1 Carl de Boor, "Neue Fragmente".
2 Adolf von Harnack, Chronologie.
3 de Boor, "Neue Fragmente".

This seems like a bug to me. Or should I be entering the names differently?
  • the way you're entering names is fine, but the handling of particles is a terrible mess. In many styles, de Boor would be right in both bibliography and citation even when at the beginning.

    As for "von"--that really depends on the nature of the "von" here (and I believe the Chicago Manual has a whole entry on that). If "von" is indeed part of the last name, and hence should appear in the short form of the name and the bibliography, you should enter it as part of the last name. Otherwise what you're doing is fine.
  • Thanks, good to know!
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