I believe I can answer your question. I will make some assumptions & you can guide me if I am wrong.

Let me start with suggesting you read a topic that is along the same line as yours. It is different but may further answer some questions on how to deal with contacts.

Post Title = Contact list syncing with multiple people with the same name.

I am assuming your contacts are through Google & are syncing. You can have multiple individual contacts with the same home number. That is not your actual problem, correct? Your problem is = When someone calls you from that number, you want it to show up as the family name instead of an individuals?

I don't know what phone you are using or contact app, but for most the Caller ID pulls up the 1st name with that number from your contacts list. The simplest thing I have found is to create a contact "A-Smith Family", "1-Smith" or "All Smith". Some tweaking may be required to find your preference. It's easiest to start with just a family or 2 as testers. The goal is to have the contact with just the home # & Family name to appear 1st in the contact list. Then when someone calls from that Home # the "Family Contact" should show on ID. This is how I have some business contacts from the same company set-up. I get the generic company name if one calls from the company but that same number is listed for each contact too. I use "1- ____" mostly.

Does this make sense? I hope I explained it okay. It really is pretty easy. Just copy & paste the #. Someone else may have a better idea or a non-native app, but I try to stay away from duplicate apps for native programs if I can. Let me know if I misunderstood or was unclear. Please let me know if it worked or if you found something better that was not posted.

• Cathleen

If you take that phone number out of your address book entirely what number format does it show when they ring you? Does it show the domestic phone number format, or an international number format (starts with a plus sign then the country number, then the phone number)?

Sounds like a silly question but this is how I've got round the problem on previous phones. As long as you're within the same country then either number format should work, both for incoming and outgoing calls, but for incoming calls the phone first looks for the number that exactly matches the incoming callerID, then tries adding/removing the international format to match. Depending on the network/line type some of my contacts default to one format, some to the other so you do have to check.

Unfortunately I haven't tried this on my Android yet (mainly because I rarely bother with landlines for people any more these days), but it could be worth trying.

The order of caller Id on my N1 for contacts sharing phone numbers seams to be alphabetical. I have done some tests with appending ext after comma but this does not seam to have an impact on the caller id at all, only on the outbound calls.