Week 15: How Do You Spell That? (52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks)

One of the things I tell people who are starting out in their family history journey is to not get hung up on a spelling. It's amazing how many ways a name can be spelled. (Just visit your local Starbucks, and you'll know what I mean!) Who is an ancestor who might have had trouble with people mangling their name? Click here to check out all the themes for 2022.

My first acceptance in misspellings deals with my first name. Back in the late 1980’s someone did a family history on my Quinn family branch. My 2nd great grandmother’s maiden name was a Quinn. In this book, they spelled my name Charleen. No big deal, but annoying. 

A few years later, someone did a family history on my O’Brion family branch. My Quinn great grandmother who married a McDonald, had a son who married an O’Brion. This author copied, like photocopied the book pages from the Quinn family book that covered the O’Brion descendants, thus my name is spelled wrong, because they photocopied the book pages. 

Just the surname of O’Brion is a weird spelling, the above branches are on my dad’s side of the family and on my mother’s side I have an O’Brien branch. I have seen the O’Brion family have spellings of O’Brien. Even some of the McDonald descendants have changed the spelling to MacDonald. 

On my mother’s side, her mother’s maiden name is Hiltz. Through the years, various branches use Hilts while others use Hiltz. I even seen brother’s use different spellings. 

I guess spelling wasn’t that important to many. Let’s be honest, many of our Ancestors didn’t know how to read or write. Thus, they didn’t know how to spell their names. Therefore, clerks and such may have spelled it phonetically. Or perhaps they used various spellings to create a unique identity. We all know families that seem to name everyone John, Timothy, James, Michael and so on. Perhaps this helped keep the John Hilts family separate from the John Hiltz family. 

In more modern times with computer systems, spelling definitely counts. Names like O’Brien with the Apostrophe can cause glitches in computer systems because it can confuse some programming languages. I have worked at places where they didn’t want us to input the apostrophe and this sometimes makes the person associated with the name upset. Someone would type O Brien while someone else typed Obrien. We know that when you sort a group of names with these spellings, they are not necessarily sorted together. Also when you do a search for Obrien it would not display O Brien because the blank space would sort before letters. However, if you sort for O Brien, you might see Obrien at the bottom of the list. Confusing right? As a member of the Daughters of the American Revolution, they even tired to come up with a standardized spelling for names. For example, if I search for an Ancestor and type in Hilts it will recommend using the spelling of Hiltz. 

Moral of story, don’t dismiss a record based on the spelling. It might be your person, look into it further. Also, don’t sweat the small stuff. If someone spells a name “wrong” in their tree, it might be the spelling they are more familiar with, one they found on a document, or just wasn’t sure which spelling to make default and they had to pick one.

Don’t forget to JUST DO GENEALOGY!