52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks - Week 3 - Unusual Name

In today's climate of unusual names and odd spelling, I sometimes look back through my family records and see an endless stream of the same names - David, Peter, Robert, Arthur, John and William for the men and Susannah, Mary, Isabelle, Anne and Elizabeth for the women.  Even the majority of the surnames in my family are fairly common - Green, Clark, Pike, Argent and so on.

Such 'common' names create their own brand of problems when I am researching.  When there are 3 'David Mulholland's arriving in Australia within a year or so of each other, I have to dig deeper to determine which one is mine.  When two of those David Mulhollands marry women named Eliza, things stay complicated.  When I have 4 generations in a row of direct ancestors named John Argent (all of whom were millers), keeping each one straight can be difficult.

Unusual names can be simpler to trace because it is less likely there will be multiple people with the name to sort through.  My mother's maiden name is Pummeroy.  When her 3xGreat grandfather arrived in Australia in the 1840's he started spelling the name this way (instead of the more usual Pomeroy) the family were the only ones with this particular spelling - so whenever I see that spelling I am pretty confident the person will fit into my tree somewhere.  Beseler is another fairly unusual name in Australia - a German family I am descended from arriving in the country in the mid 1800s.

The problem with such unusual names is that they tend to be more frequently misspelled.  If you want to be creative in how you spell Green, there really isn't too much you can do.  Beseler allows much greater scope.  One 's' or two, one 'l' or two, one or two 'z' instead of the 's', miss the middle 'e' - on my grandfather's death certificate his mother, Eliza Beseler is listed as Eliza Sezler!  While search engines today can be quite flexible with spelling variations these days (I always make sure any option for exact spelling only is not active) there are limits to what they will pick up.  For my more unusual names especially, multiple searches may be necessary to locate what I am looking so.

Sometime I find saying the name out loud helps, especially if I try it with a bit of an accent (be careful where you do this).  Keeping a record of all the spelling variations you have already come across can also be helpful, and may give you hints of how other names in your family may have been incorrectly recorded.

Also keep in mind the possibilities with nicknames, abbreviations and  aliases.  Some people in your family may have changed their names to fit better when they moved to a new country - my German "Lizabetta" became Elizabeth, her sister Susetta became Susan.  Another ancestor Elizabeth May was better known as Betsy, and it is as Betsy Green (after her marriage) that she appears in census records and on her death certificate.  Carl Friedrich Beseler, born in 1810 in Germany, soon becomes Frederick Beseler after he emigrates to Australia - dropping his first name and Anglicizing his middle name.

Finally, it can be the more unusual names that we remember most clearly - the ones who stand out from the 'James Clark's and 'Henry Pike's that turn up, generation after generation, filling the many branches in my family tree.