Spelling Your Ancestors' Names

Finding your ancestor's name in a ship manifest, US Census, and indexes is a exercise of creativity. I faced the challenge many times while searching for an ancestor, and found, at the end, the most uncommon spelling of an original name or surname. The article below belongs to one of the most important books a researcher needs to have and it will clarify and help you understand better what happened to their names when they crossed the Atlantic to live in the USA.

My Portuguese Gen author's own photo, 2021.

[The following article is excerpted from Val Greenwood's acclaimed textbook, The Researcher’s Guide to American Genealogy. 4th Edition. Chapter 2 - Language, Terminology, and Important Issues, page 29] 

Spelling by Val Greenwood

“The use of phonetic spellings and the lack of conventional spellings can be thorny problems. If you go back just 150 years (or even less), a significant percentage of the U.S. population could not read, more still could not write (many could write only their own names), and even more could not spell. Most of those who did write were not concerned with so-called standard spellings; they spelled words as they sounded--phonetically—and as skewed by their local accents. Also, insofar as accents are concerned, remember that the early settlers of America came from many foreign lands. When a record was made, the writer wrote what he heard, accent and all. Also, remember that standardized spellings are a recent phenomenon. (Note that all examples of various documents in this book have retained original spellings.)

What is the significance of these facts? It means that, as researchers, we need the ability to decipher writings with unique spellings in the unfamiliar handwriting of many different scribes. You will oftentimes be called upon to decipher scripts in which you will puzzle over simple words just because they are misspelled and written in an unfamiliar hand.

Another problem quite surprising to the uninitiated is the multitude of spelling variations in names (especially surnames) and places. In his will made in 1754 in Pasquotank County, North Carolina, Jeremiah Wilcox's family name is spelled two different ways--Willcox and Willcocks. In other documents it is spelled still other ways--Wilcox, Wilcocks, Welcox, Wellcocks, Welcocks, etc. Because Jeremiah could not write (he made a mark for his signature), he had no idea about the correct spelling of his name, if it was ever being spelled correctly, or if there even was a correct spelling. The spelling of his name was entirely at the mercy of the person who chanced to write it.

Jeremiah Wilcox’s situation illustrates the fallacy of believing, as so many people do today, that if a name is not spelled in a certain way, those persons with different spellings have no connection to our family. By embracing this false notion, they overlook much valuable family history information. We must not worry if a name is spelled with an "a" rather than an "e," with an "ie" rather than a "y," or with only one "n". Of course, the connection to our family is not guaranteed, but neither is it guaranteed even when the spellings are the same, In both cases, we have to do the research and carefully weigh the evidence.

While we are discussing the spelling issue, I want to return to the subject of indexes and how we search them. When searching an index, we must consider every possible spelling of the name we seek. It is so very easy to overlook some of the less logical (to us) possibilities and thus neglect many valuable records. Because local dialects and foreign accents often make a significant difference, the pronunciation of a name might have been quite different in Massachusetts than in Georgia, and so might the way it is spelled in the records.

In legal practice, there is a rule called the Rule of "Idem Sonans." This rule says (and this is complicated) that in order to establish legal proof of relationship from documentary evidence it is not necessary for the name to be spelled absolutely accurately if, as spelled, it conveys to the ear, when pronounced in the accepted ways, a sound practically identical to the correctly spelled name as properly pronounced.

Several years ago I worked on a problem where the family’s surname was spelled twenty-four different ways in the very same locality. Some of those variant spellings even began with different letters of the alphabet. The correct spelling of the name (supposedly) was "Ingold," but the following variations were found: Ingle, Ingell, Ingles, Ingells, Ingel, Ingels, Ingeld, Inkle, Inkles, Inkell, Ingolde, Engold, Engle, Engell, Engles, Engel, Engels, Engeld, Angold, Angle, and Ankold. Would you have considered all of these? Or would you have stopped with those beginning with the letter "I"—or even all of those listed?

Other spelling possibilities are Jugold and Jugle. Such variations could easily occur in an index because of the similarities between the capital I's and J's and the small n's and u's. There may also be other logical possibilities.

Another family changed the spelling of its name from Beatty to Baitey when moving from one locality to another. In another instance the name Kerr was found interchanged with Carr. Whether these spelling changes were intentional is unknown, but intention makes little difference. In one family three brothers deliberately spelled their family surname differently--Matlock, Matlack, and Matlick—which is actually quite common, even in our day. In his history of the Zabriskie family, George 0. Zabriskie reported having found 123 variations of Zabriskie, though not all in the same locality or same time period—and I should mention that many of these were not in the U.S.”

I am not associated in any ways to the website below where you can buy this book. My intent is merely educational.

https://genealogical.com/store/the-researchers-guide-to-american-genealogy/