Lady, EVOLVED 
does T·E·I seriously not have a single word of current guidance on how to classify maiden names
<persName>
<forename type="given">Margaret</forename>
<forename type="unused">Hilda</forename>
<surname type="birth">Roberts</surname>
<surname type="married">Thatcher</surname>
</persName>
?
@gaditb if you check the URL this is outdated documentation in the Vault, not current recommended practice
@gaditb oh! i was thinking of a very similar example which used "maiden" instead of "birth"… is this current??
@gaditb (searching for “maiden” obviously would not bring up “birth” if it isn’t mentioned in the surrounding text, which i suppose it was not?)
@Lady No idea if it's current -- I'm not that familar with TEI, I just searched 'TEI Names' and skimmed there, trying to get a sense of what it's about.
The URL I found was: https://tei-c.org/release/doc/tei-p5-doc/en/html/ND.html
@gaditb no, TEI is in general a very loose set of guidelines (because the scope of things they encode is very very broad)
the expectation is that you decide on the types that are applicable for your project and then document them yourself in the TEI header, if you care to be formal about it
some elements will, in their documentation, suggest types for common purposes (<title> suggests "main" and "sub" i’m pretty sure), but even that is a soft recommendation
@Lady <forename type="dead">Mike</forename><surname>Marks</surname>
@Lady Is "type" for Names a closed/fully-specified category? I tried to look for, like, "here's the list of options "type" can take here", but couldn't find anything on a quick look.