Sometimes people just get confused. The obituary for a relative listed her mother’s maiden name. The name in parenthesis was not the name the mother was born with. It was the name of the mother’s second husband-after the relative’s parents were divorced.
Wrong names are still wrong. They just may be relevant in ways that we don’t expect. When you discover that a name is “wrong,” keep it in your notes. It may turn out to mean something later.
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This seems to be a problem with my great-grandmother. Her marriage license shows her last name as Knoffel. There are very few people with this last name. I read that many names were misspelled on the boat manifest. Because of that miss spelling follows them in other documents.
Errors in the manifest depend on the time period and most of the time they are more accurate than people believe. Incorrect spellings occur most often in records in the area where the people settled as various clerks and officials were often unfamiliar with non-English names. Knoffel on a marriage license could be an incorrect spelling of a variety of Germanic names.