This week's theme #52Ancestors is 'Creativity', which has me thinking about all the creative ways we can record and display our family history, and how creative we often need to be to break down the brick walls in our research.
Even with something as basic as a name, we often need to be creative in our research. From church records to birth, marriage and death
registrations, census records to electoral rolls and passenger lists to
immigration and naturalization records, many of our favourite sources for
family information have been captured with a variety of spellings, handwritings, and
abbreviations. As those historical collections have been digitized and
transcribed, modern day technicians have struggled to correctly interpret and
preserve an entry from long ago, and subsequently we as researchers must be creative to find them.
If there is one thing I have learnt in my years of researching my family, it is
that NO surname, however simple, will EVER be recorded with the same spelling
all the time. When researching, we need to be creative and consider how a name may have been
misspelled or incorrectly recorded. Remember that the clerk creating the record spelled the name the way he felt
like spelling it - how it sounded to him at the time. And frequently he
got it wrong. Sometimes he got it spectacularly wrong!
Abbreviations can also complicate research - William was often abbreviated as
Wm, Thomas as Thos or Tom, Patrick as Pat or Patk or Patr, Daniel as Dan or
Danl or Danny, Margaret as Maggie, Elizabeth as Beth or Eliza. When
searching for an ancestor, be mindful that an exact search for a given name may
unintentionally hide an ancestor from view if the original record or
transcription used an abbreviation.
In addition to alternate spellings and abbreviations, another source of
name
variations comes from errors made during the transcription process. As
people transcribe family history records, they seek to preserve content
exactly
as it appears in the historical original. Despite best efforts, errors
do
occur and names can be unintentionally altered. Consider how old
handwriting may be misinterpreted - both by you and by earlier
transcribers or indexers.
Some databases are quite flexible in regards to spelling variations when
searching, but they will never cover every possible error and sometimes several
searches are necessary to locate an elusive record. Remember to be
creative and keep digging - you never know what you might find - or how it may
be spelled!
