How Do You Spell That?

Genealogy research is never easy, and when a surname can be spelled in many ways, it can make it even tougher. However, one can make it even harder if only one spelling of the name is researched.

My grandmother started me on that road back when I first began researching her family line. Her mother’s name was Lela Ann Loveless. She was very insistent that it was spelled with LESS at the end and not LACE. It did not take me long to discover that her ancestors were listed in records under all kinds of spellings: Loveless, Lovelace, Loveliss, etc. I wrote about this name previously here.

Recordkeepers wrote down the name as they heard it. It really depended on the education of the recordkeeper. Sometimes these misspellings can indicate how a person pronounced the name. Lela Ann was listed in the 1900 census as “Leelar” which clearly indicates the pronunciation of her name in an Arkansas accent. I can just hear my grandmother say my mother’s name, also Lela, in the same manner.

On my grandfather’s side, his Johnston surname is listed in records often as Johnson. This one is even tougher. Since the Johnson name is so common, how do I know if the Johnson I am finding is really my Johnston or another person named Johnson. I have to look at the others in the household and corroborate the data with what I already know. Even then, how can I be sure? I definitely have to collect as much information as I can so I have good data points to analyze.

Another of my grandmother’s ancestors is her grandmother Martha Jane Coor. In early records of her ancestors, I found this name written as Coor, Core, Cour, Coore, and Coar. Sometimes the name was written in multiple ways in the same document!

So, when researching your ancestors, keep track of the various ways their name can be spelled. Use those different spelling in search fields Indexers can also “see” a wrong spelling because of poor handwriting, so be open to those other spellings in the results. Our Johnston family was indexed in the 1850 census in Yalobusha County, Mississippi as “Dehson” and that is what it looks like, but the family make up is clearly the same as the 1860 census in the same location where Samuel Johnson is written clearly.

Is that Dehnson or Johnson?

#52Ancestors-Week 15: How Do You Spell That?

This is my fifth year working on this year-long prompt, hosted by Amy Johnson Crow (https://www.amyjohnsoncrow.com/) at Generations Cafe. I write each week in one of my two blogs, either Mam-ma’s Southern Family or at My Trails into the Past. I have enjoyed writing about my children’s ancestors in new and exciting ways.


Copyright © 2022 by Lisa S. Gorrell, Mam-ma's Southern Family, All rights reserved.

Comments

  1. Jacqueline Threet HendersonApril 12, 2022 at 11:17 PM

    So many spellings. Must be frustrating at times.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Miss MerryApril 13, 2022 at 11:07 AM

    I have never seen my ggrandmother's unusual name spelled the same way twice. I would love to know how it was truly pronounced. Again, spellings can vary even in the same document. And when she married at 16, her father used a family nickname. I even have it starting with two different letters to increase spelling selections. Her maiden name began with a "T" except for one census when it is very clearly written with an "S". There are two spellings of her maiden name used on tombstones in the family cemetery in the same generation.

    ReplyDelete

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