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I was playing around with this and found something very interesting. One family name is Spurgeon/spurgin. I've looked it up and its origion is 'uncertain' but possibly Dane. So I plugged it into the search and the areas with families of that name were virtually all in the area controlled by the Danes. Most curious. Some of the links didn't work but a most interesting list.
I have two relatives, one on my maternal side and one on my paternal side whose lasts names have 3-4 variations each, simply because of clerical error and/or illteracy, and those weren't the only ancestors whose names changed spelling. As recently as last year, when Ancestry transcribed the 1940 census, the person who inputted it into their database incorrectly read the handwritten census and added another spelling to our family name. They refused to change it in their database when I brought it to their attention and just added the correct spelling in as an "alternate spelling", though the original handwritten census very clearly, to me, spelled our name correctly. It happens.
The variations you notice often just hearken back to an era when spelling was not standardized. That does not mean that the person who wrote the name down was illiterate. Sometimes the owner of the name spelled it differently at different times. It is not unusual to see different branches of the same family eventually adopt different spellings, too. I have a collateral line with some spelling their surname Massengale and some Massingill.
Census transcription errors are just a fact of life. They do nothing to change a person's name, they just make it more difficult to find people in the census. The person creating the index must try to transcribe what the enumerator wrote; he is not allowed to change it, even if he happens to know the person in the census. Enumerators made mistakes for a lot of reasons. Sometimes the person giving the information was a neighbor, not a family member, for example. I am convinced that the person giving the information for one of my families had a lisp!
The alternate spelling system that Ancestry.com uses does help to improve the searchability of the index. But they are not going to change the actual index itself.
Edited to add: It is possible that someone trying to fit a person into his tree might change a name in order to make the person fit, essentially turning a square peg into a round one. Ancestry.com really has no way to confirm that what you think is correct is actually the true name.
Last edited by suzy_q2010; 04-30-2013 at 10:44 AM..
Variations in the spelling of names is really common. I have one line that is Gladden or Gladding or Gladen or Gladwin or ?? Sometimes if there were several branches of a family they would do it on purpose to differentiate. You might have John Gladden and one son would be Sam Gladding and another would be Peter Gladwin, etc. Other times it's just a matter of how it happened to be written. Sometimes one person would even be Gladden for a while and then Gladwin later.
On the UK census it says my gt grandfather was born in Sheffield, England. Thank goodness for the internet or I would have actually believed that! Turns out, as someone across the pond informed me, the town was called Shelf, not Sheffield at all. whew! I think that error could have been due to regional accents and distance from his home village when the census was taken. When that particular census was taken he didn't live near his home village. The enumerator would have never heard of the village of Shelf but he would have heard of the city of Sheffield. Add to that the regional dialect and it's no wonder they got it wrong.
there is the not so infrequent occurrence of clerical error in immigration, registration, and census records. I have found my forebears names spelled any number of ways by in attentive census recorders.
From what I've gathered, many of my immigrant ancestors were semi-literate and sometimes did not know how to spell their own last name.
Looked up my surname and it was pretty much as expected. Ancestors came from Genoa, so a large concentration in Liguria. Also a large concentration in Lazio - I assumed it was Rome but it looks like the lead is in Latina & Frosinone although that could just be a percentages game in such a smaller population. Was suprised that the only other administrative district in Italy that had a high concentration was Calabria appears the locale is Crotone.
In the US as expected. They came in through CA. Spent some time in CO, although most moved out. Then the family settled in FL, NY, PA & NJ for the most part .... these show as the highest concentrations.
I can also see my impact to the numbers in a couple states where I've hit the phonebook
Variations in the spelling of names is really common. I have one line that is Gladden or Gladding or Gladen or Gladwin or ?? Sometimes if there were several branches of a family they would do it on purpose to differentiate. You might have John Gladden and one son would be Sam Gladding and another would be Peter Gladwin, etc. Other times it's just a matter of how it happened to be written. Sometimes one person would even be Gladden for a while and then Gladwin later.
On the UK census it says my gt grandfather was born in Sheffield, England. Thank goodness for the internet or I would have actually believed that! Turns out, as someone across the pond informed me, the town was called Shelf, not Sheffield at all. whew! I think that error could have been due to regional accents and distance from his home village when the census was taken. When that particular census was taken he didn't live near his home village. The enumerator would have never heard of the village of Shelf but he would have heard of the city of Sheffield. Add to that the regional dialect and it's no wonder they got it wrong.
One of my ancestors did this over several generations. He was named the vairation ending in 'in' of the name. He had twin sons.
His twin sons had twin sons. They used the spelling of the name ending in eon for their twin sons. They also both named their sons after themselves and their brother. The others used the same as himself. I noticed there is a "John" in each generation. If Dad was John the son has the other spelling.
Then there was my great grandfather who got into a dispute with his brothers. He legally changed his name to the 'in' ending just to show them.
They were farmers back in England and mostly farmers up to when my great grandfather started working for the Union Pacific so I guess 'jr' or the 'the second' etc didn't appeal to them.
...
And sometimes it IS the government who changes names. In 1860, King Kamehameha IV signed the Act to Regulate Names in Hawai'i. Children had to take their father's given name as a surname and were given a Christian first name, and their Hawaiian previous first name then became their middle names. The law wasn't repealed until 1967 <-- very recently, and no, it didn't affect "just a few" people!
You make a really good point. I personally know someone who was born on a reservation in a western state. Her family was made to take last names by the federal government in the early 1900s. They were given a list of names to choose from. The one they chose? Smith.
I was playing around with this and found something very interesting. One family name is Spurgeon/spurgin. I've looked it up and its origion is 'uncertain' but possibly Dane. So I plugged it into the search and the areas with families of that name were virtually all in the area controlled by the Danes. Most curious. Some of the links didn't work but a most interesting list.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Finger Laker
Looked up my surname and it was pretty much as expected. Ancestors came from Genoa, so a large concentration in Liguria. Also a large concentration in Lazio - I assumed it was Rome but it looks like the lead is in Latina & Frosinone although that could just be a percentages game in such a smaller population. Was suprised that the only other administrative district in Italy that had a high concentration was Calabria appears the locale is Crotone.
In the US as expected. They came in through CA. Spent some time in CO, although most moved out. Then the family settled in FL, NY, PA & NJ for the most part .... these show as the highest concentrations.
I can also see my impact to the numbers in a couple states where I've hit the phonebook
Thanks for sharing how the maps helped. It's interesting to hear.
I'm pretty lucky in that my birth surname is rare, at least with our spelling, and our exact spelling goes back at least into the 1700's, which is as far back as I've seen so far, though I know that branches in Britain use a different spelling. Long rambling sentence, sorry.
In my adoptive father's ancestry, three brothers left Germany to move to America, and all three of them ended up using different spellings for their last name, kind of funny.
From what I've gathered, many of my immigrant ancestors were semi-literate and sometimes did not know how to spell their own last name.
If you're basing this off of census records, spelling tells you nothing about your ancestors. Censuses are taken for demographic purposes, not for identification, and enumerators frequently didn't bother to get the spelling correct.
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