{"id":7270,"date":"2017-09-27T19:18:38","date_gmt":"2017-09-28T00:18:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/genealogytipoftheday.com\/?p=7270"},"modified":"2019-09-27T07:41:08","modified_gmt":"2019-09-27T12:41:08","slug":"the-rite-of-spelling-wright-right","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/genealogytipoftheday.com\/index.php\/2017\/09\/27\/the-rite-of-spelling-wright-right\/","title":{"rendered":"The Rite of Spelling Wright Right"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><img decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignright size-medium wp-image-7273\" src=\"https:\/\/genealogytipoftheday.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/09\/rarely-census-taker-mind-233x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"233\" height=\"300\" srcset=\"https:\/\/genealogytipoftheday.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/09\/rarely-census-taker-mind-233x300.jpg 233w, https:\/\/genealogytipoftheday.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/09\/rarely-census-taker-mind.jpg 393w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 233px) 100vw, 233px\" \/>There can be much gnashing of teeth about what spelling is &#8220;correct.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>It is important to remember that 20th and 21st century concerns over spellings and names matching exactly were not a concern in an earlier time. In some places they were not even a concern in the early 20th century.<\/p>\n<p>Documents should be transcribed as they are written, even if the name is not spelled &#8220;right.&#8221;\u00a0 If a census spells great-grandma&#8217;s name as &#8220;Fany,&#8221; that&#8217;s how I transcribe the document for my records. Because that is what it said. If my great-grandma&#8217;s birth certificate spells her name clearly as &#8220;Francis,&#8221; then that is what I transcribe the record as. I don&#8217;t change it. If great-grandma herself always signed it as Fannie and that&#8217;s what most of her records referred to her as, what she had on her tombstone, and what everyone referred to her as&#8211;then that&#8217;s how I refer to her when writing about her.<\/p>\n<p>I don&#8217;t get in a tither when a document writes her name as &#8220;Frannie.&#8221; I make certain it is her (comparing other details in the document to what I know about her), I transcribe it exactly as it is, make a notation, and move on.<\/p>\n<p>In the rite of transcription, one is right to transcribe &#8220;Wright&#8221; as &#8220;Right&#8221; if &#8220;Right&#8221; is how it&#8217;s spelled on the record. One of the rites of solid research is to to write, separate from the transcription, our own commentary about the &#8220;right&#8221; spelling.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>There can be much gnashing of teeth about what spelling is &#8220;correct.&#8221; It is important to remember that 20th and 21st century concerns over spellings and names matching exactly were not a concern in an earlier time. In some places they were not even a concern in the early 20th century. Documents should be transcribed [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":153978,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"","_seopress_titles_title":"","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7270","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/genealogytipoftheday.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7270","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/genealogytipoftheday.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/genealogytipoftheday.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/genealogytipoftheday.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/153978"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/genealogytipoftheday.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7270"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/genealogytipoftheday.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7270\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/genealogytipoftheday.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7270"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/genealogytipoftheday.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7270"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/genealogytipoftheday.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7270"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}