I'm in the process of making townies for an empty neighborhood. I've seen premade townies organized by household. When you call or summon a townie, you can find them under the Smiths or whatever instead of having to scroll through the list searching for an individual name. The individual name list could be very long. How do I do that? Do I make a household with the surname Jones, move the sims into the Jones household, then make them townies? Would they retain the household name? Is there some other way to do it?

Back up the neighborhood and try.

If you want to change the household a townie is in, it can be done in SimPE, in the FAMI data.

Sorry but no, they will go in separate.
I don't know how to do it but you can try this.
Use SimPE and find out how the reg. townies are listed and what house hold there in and try the same type of set up for your townies you are making.

I'm sorry it's taken me so long to get back to you. Unfortunate events get in the way.

I tried both ways, making townies from a household ingame and changing the FAMI name in SimPE. Neither of them worked. Somehow EA managed it but there doesn't appear to be any straightforward (or even sideways) way to get the same result.

Thanks to both of you for your suggestions!

Using the FAMI data, you can move townies from one household to another. There's an Add/Remove button with a drop-down field in center right of the data screen (IIRC; can't look at SimPE right now).

If changing the name, you may have to change in more than one place. I know when making a townie into a playable, there's a text string I have to change.