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! 

Week 14: “Check it Out”

The theme for Week 14 (and the monthly theme for April) is "Check It Out." We often use this phrase when we want someone to pay attention to something neat. ("Hey! Check it out!") It's also something you do with some library books. What does that inspire you to write about? Click here to check out all the themes for 2022.

Most genealogist will have some sort of books. I started with “How to” books because starting anything new, I wanted to do it right. Well, it didn’t help. (giggle). It helped a little but I did do my share of mistakes and I even restarted my genealogy, lucky I had less than 300 people in my tree, so it wasn’t all bad.

Through the years I look for books on skills I want to improve on. I have books on organizing my genealogy, many books on DNA, I have some dealing with digitizing my family history, how to cite your sources, about the genealogical research standards, how to become an accredited genealogist. Even books on various software packages that I can use for recording my genealogy.

I also have some history books, one for Columbia County, Wisconsin (a remake), another on the families in Mohawk Valley, New York and a few specific family history books, one for the Boone Family, the Hiltz Family, the O’Brion Family, and the Quinn family.

Genealogy is the only hobby (I use that word loosely because it’s a passion for me), that the more time you spend on it, the harder it gets. Think about it. For example, I crochet, I started out learning the stitches, and the more I do it, the easier it becomes because the better I get at it. Of course, I might have to lookup a new type of stitch or watch a tutorial on how to do that stitch, but everyone is going to do that stitch the same way.

Genealogy on the other hand gets harder because finding the documents to prove the next generation are rarer to find. Everyone’s might be basically doing the same thing, researching their family, their ancestors, etc.… But where they are looking are different based on where your family lived, what records survived that location and as in the book listed above on the families in the Mohawk Valley, New York, what has already been researched. Plus, how far you are able to trace your family will be different for each person because our families are so different. 

Books help me become a better researcher, to see what others are doing to find records. I can learn from others and apply those skills to my work. I always say, work smarter not harder. This also applies to Genealogy. Besides books, I watch a lot of Webinars, YouTube Videos, read other people’s blogs, belong to various Facebook groups so that I can become a better Genealogist. If I learn only one new thing, it is worth it to me. Yes, sometimes the topic is a review, however the lecturer might show me a different way of doing something. We are creatures of habit, thus if we keep doing what we have always done, we will always get the same results. Learning new websites or learning new search strategies might lead us to new results. 

My advice, CHECK IT OUT, and grow your knowledge and skill base for doing genealogy.