Variations in how your ancestor’s name was spelled can be endlessly frustrating. However, it’s worth remembering that a variation of how your ancestor’s name appears in an index can arise from a variety of situations:
- Your ancestor did not know how to spell his name
- Your ancestor could not read
- Your ancestor did not speak clearly
- Your ancestor had an accent with which the writer of his name was unfamiliar
- The clerk didn’t care
- The clerk had bad writing
- The transcriber could not read the name
- The transcriber did not care
- The transcriber made a typographical error
- The document has faded over time and is difficult to read
- Or something else
Keep in mind that one of more of these could explain why James Rampley ends up indexed as Jarvis Pample.
5 Responses
It was really frustrating when I was working in the indexing of the 1940 census at familysearch.org – I came across a family that I knew PERSONALLY, but I was outvoted in the spelling of their name by two people who obviously had never met them, with no appeal and no way to explain why I was right.
Nancy, I have experienced the same thing at times. What I do is contact individuals with the information (proof) and just let it go. I try to always document and explain the reason why the change is correct. It really is about all you can do. Take care and have a Hhappy Thanksgiving.
My family name, Cruikshank, can be spelled at least 43 different way. And that’s not counting spelling it with a “K”! My 4x great-grandfather spelled it Crookshanks. It wasn’t until my grandfather that they started spelling it, Cruikshank. And my 3x great-aunt spelled her name Dorkus because she didn’t know how to write her name and the census taker spelled it the best way he knew how. (It was actually spelled, Dorcas)
And spelling didn’t used to be as important as it is now. A look at the he journals kept by Lewis and Clark on their cross 3 year country camping trip one finds a very large number of misspellings and inconsistent spellings, my favorite ‘mosquito’, and both Meriwether Lewis and William Clark were well educated men.
WOW I was not aware of so many reasons 4 misspellings. That helps me understand considerably.