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Archiver > TMG > 2002-10 > 1033493469


From: "Cheri Casper" <>
Subject: RE: [TMG] Family NAME Change
Date: Tue, 1 Oct 2002 10:31:23 -0700
In-Reply-To: <200210011106120020.00806AA3@mailhub.aros.net>


Sutart - I agree with you on this. I do have one family who appears to have
changed the spelling of their name over the course of the years, but who
really knows. I may be that the person at the courthouse when they applied
for the marriage record didn't know how to spell the name. I have even
found it spelled 3 different ways in city directories, beginning in 1923
through the 1960s. I just plain chalk these up to scrivener's error. There
is absolutely no way I would ever record my grandfather's first name as
"Lillard" or "Lenard" as the census takers recorded it. His name was
Leonard and that is the spelling I am sticking with.

Especially with the censuses, it is highly likely that the census taker just
wrote it down as they considered the name to be spelled. Therefore, I see
no point in creating a special tag to record the name as it appeared on
every census to perpetuate what *I believe to be* plain recording errors,
not actual alternate spellings.

CheriC



-----Original Message-----
From: Stuart Armstrong [mailto:]
Sent: Tuesday, October 01, 2002 10:06 AM
To:
Subject: Re: [TMG] Family NAME Change


I "correct" names all the time, and I don't consider it bad practice. If
they wrote Gallemore as Gallimore, Galimore, or Galamore, to me it is all
the same. It sounds the same no matter how you spell it, and to me Galimore
just happens to be the way they wrote Gallemore. The same document will very
frequently spell the same name of the same person differently in the same
paragraph. I classify spelling in the same category as handwriting. It is an
_interpretation_ of the name. _My_ interpretation, that is. So I do not
hesitate to record a name the way I want to spell it.

However, I do not intend to misslead my reader. I do record in the citation
detail exactly how the name is spelled in the document, without comment. The
reader can see if he reads the footnotes that I have interpreted the
spelling differently than what was written. But there are many instances
where the handwritten name is recognized not by the forming of each
individual letter, but by the appearance of the name as a whole. The letters
themselves are often slurred over, run together, scribbled, or truncated. So
the name is more _recognized_ than spelled. And the recognition is an
interpretive process.

So how does one interpret "Jos" with two squiggly marks after it and two
dots under the squiggly marks? Do I go to all the trouble to try to describe
the squiggly marks? Not on your life! Do I hunt for the superscript codes of
my word processor and attempt to interpret it as Jos superscript ph? Even if
the squiggly did remotely look like a ph, it is vain to think I can
represent every scribble exactly with 26 characters. No, I just recognize
that this is the way this particular scribe always wrote Joseph and I spell
out Joseph in my transcription without even stopping to think about it --
and often without even being aware of it! It is my interpretation of his
handwriting. If Wm is written in a way that is clearly the scribe's way of
writing William, I write William. So Benj is Benjamin, Thos is Thomas, Jno
is John, etc. If you don't agree -- sorry, that is my interpretation of the
handwriting. It looks like Thomas to me. When I see Wm my mind instantly
verbalizes William, !
because I know that's what it is. I can't even stop myself from doing that.
Otherwise I would just have to trace it and let you figure it out.

I do not consider spelling of names a critical thing that needs much
exactness. My justification for this is that most older records (and even
some modern ones) do not themselves treat spelling in any critical or
consistant manner. If it wasn't important to them then it wasn't important.
What is important is to be able to recognize the name and distinguish it
from other names. If I made a name tag for every way I think the name was
spelled in the original records, there really are some persons in my
database that would have twenty name tags -- and to what purpose? There are
times when exactness goes beyond the mark.

*********** REPLY SEPARATOR ***********

On 10/1/02, at 09:06, Joe Makowiec wrote:

>At 07:45 AM 10-1-2002 -0500, Mike Fox wrote:
>>I would like to change the spelling of the family name for a large
>>number of individuals. Could anyone tell me where to find the
>>instructions how to change all at once rather than one by one?

<snip>

>Why do you want to do this? There seems to be pretty general agreement
>that you should record names as they appear in your sources. What you
>might want to do rather than "correcting" the names is to add a (custom)
>name-std tag, where you put in the 'correct' or standardized spelling of


Stuart Armstrong
mail to:
web page: http://cgi.aros.net/~stuarta


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