in a genealogy over 100 years ago, the last name of a relative’s second husband was incorrectly typed as “Crown.”
Turns out that the last name was actually Brown. This was discovered when the estate file of the first husband was read completely. In the first reference to the widow with her new last name, it sort of looks like Crown. But there are three later references where it is clearly Brown.
Sure enough the widow was found in other records as “Brown.”
2 Responses
I am not good at doing advanced online searches,
but I have read that you can leave letters out to search to avoid these mistakes.
_rown
_row_
B___n
This is true and these searches should be used (called wildcard searches), but there are still many, many records that have no digital indexes and so manual searching of either records or indexes is necessary.