Researching family names we have never heard pronounced can present challenges when those names originate in a language other than the one in which the records were kept.
It can be worse when we don’t speak that language either.
For any name, try and find out two things:
- How it was likely spoken by your ancestor.
- How it is likely said by people today.
Both ways matter. That “original” pronunciation will impact how the name is in early records and knowing how the name is pronounced today will impact how the name can be written in later records.
This issues are not usually an issue with people researching Jones and Smith. It is a concern when tracing any last name that’s “foreign” and is how Behrens gets written at “Barnes” and how Desmarais gets written as “Demarrah.” Sometimes names of families that have lived in the United States forever are pronounced in ways that we do not often expect. Taliaferro is one of the best examples as it is pronounced in such a way that it sounds like “Toliver.”
Contacting someone who knows the original language or who has the name today can be a good starting point for how the name was said and is said.
4 Responses
Even English names can be problematic because of all the local accents, compounded by scribes who couldn’t spell the same name the same way twice in one line!
Exactly. That’s also true. Sometimes when I lecture on spelling variants, I have people tell me that “this doesn’t apply to my non-immigrant ancestors.” Pronunciation issues impact all of us.
Spelling of the name can sometimes give a clue. Take my married name. We pronounce it gor-RELL. However, when we went to a family reunion once in Missouri, another Gorrell family came from Virginia or WV, and said it was pronounce goral with no accent at all. Well, when I was recently looking at PA tax records of the ancestral line, the name was written in such a way that the second pronunciation was probably prevalent there, too. (spellings like goral, gurl, giral, etc). Somehow it changed over time for our family line.
That’s exactly right about variant spellings. I have a relative with the same last name and I hear it pronounced both ways.