Orthography - Spelling and Surnames

 Why am I writing a blog post about spelling in a blog about family history?  Because it's important. 

Throughout all the years that I've been researching all the branches of my family tree, I encountered variations in the names of ancestors.  Sometimes the number of variations of a person's name were so many and the time it took to look up every spelling that it was exhausting.

But, the fact is that the spelling of American English was not standardized until the early 1800s.

In addition, most people were not educated and were unable to read or write in our United States until the late 1800s and early 1900s.  Even then most did not attend school past a few years in elementary school.

The result is that the names in most early records were written by someone other than the person the records is about.  You will find records that were written by someone else and signed with and X that is indicated as "their mark".

Surnames, and even given names, were written as they sounded to the person writing them.  I often ask myself why they didn't ask how the name was spelled but they probably didn't ask because most people didn't know how their name was spelled.

I've begun to keep my eyes open for actual signatures of people but they don't appear that often and certainly not usually before the 1900s.

Even within a single document, written by someone whose job it was to write the document, even legal documents like wills, ordinary words, as well as names, can vary in older records.  If you look at a transcription of our own Constitution, you will see such variations.

Spelling could vary depending on the amount of education of the writer, the geographic area that the writer came from, the historic time frame of the document and personal spelling quirks of the writer.

So, a surname, in particular, can vary over generations, within a family.  

Why does it matter?  Because, being social animals, we need to understand each other when we attempt to communicate with each other.  

Most modern languages have a standardized orthography, so everybody understands how a word is spelled so everybody knows what word is being said or written so there is as little misunderstanding as possible.  Certainly, in terms of names, it can be very important to know who is being spoken or written about.

Also, originally, names meant something.  They were just a collection of letters strung together to make a sound.  They often told something about a person without actually seeing them.  The given name Rufus, for example, means red and was usually given to a male child with red hair.  

In the case of surnames, some told what occupation someone had, some were derives from a parent's name, from where the family lived, some on their physical appearance, etc.  That's a much longer subject and one that I'm not that interested in writing about but anyone can research that online.

My interested in this topic is that when we research our families, we need to remember that names, surnames and given names, vary in documents and sticking to the spelling that we're most familiar with is a mistake, if we really want to learn about our families.

I started the 2 one-name studies I'm conducting:  Beismer and Wormuth, because I've been frustrated with the variants and I'm hoping that researching the names will reveal more information about the various families and how they may be related or not.  

I don't have the origins of either family in my own family tree.  I have already learned, because of the variant spellings, that those variants often exist because of where those specific families were from.  If or how they were related will, undoubtedly, take much longer to determine.

Given Names

While you have every right to write your own name anyway you want (even though it may bug me), a name usually means something.  You may even have created a unique name for yourself, again, you have every right.  Does your name mean something, if it's a creation of your own?

Cultures vary in their treatment and their conventions of both surnames and given names.  I know what my given names mean; they suit me.  Interestingly, I know that I was to be called something else.  When I think about that name; it doesn't suit me.  I can't say why but it matters to me.

More about this in the blogs for the one-name studies, when I get to them.