Tuesday's tip - what does it look like, what does it sound like?

When you are searching in indexes, sometimes you don't find what you are looking for because the spelling isn't what you expected it to be. If you haven't already discovered this for yourself, go back and write out the first sentence 100 times before proceeding any further!

OK, having established this principle, how do you deal with it? There are several strategies, and the best one to employ depends on the source you are using. You have to think about how the information was recorded in the first place, and how it has been copied since then. For example, was the name written down as it sounded? This would happen when an illiterate farm labourer registered the birth of a child and the registrar wrote it down. An illiterate person would have no way of knowing whether the registrar had spelled the name correctly; registrars had some guidance on the standard spellings of forenames, but surnames can be much trickier. A registrar, or anyone writing down an unfamiliar name  without any way of checking the spelling, will do the best they can, but he result may look quite different from the more usual spelling of the name, and often begins with a different letter. Sometimes it helps to say a name out loud in the local accent. This worked for me when I had trouble with the surname Aveyard in Yorkshire, and the person I was looking for sometimes appeared with the surname Halfyard. If you don't know what a Yorkshire accent sounds like this will make no sense, but trust me, it works.

Then there is the question of copying. Details of births, marriages and deaths were copied by local registrars and clergy and sent to the General Register Office, where they were copied again by GRO clerks (twice - once on transcription slips and again on the index pages themselves, up to 1865). At all stages the names were hand-written in cursive script, so the writers sometimes mistook one letter for another because they looked similar. Letters that look similar when hand-written are not the same as those that are similar in block capitals, or printed. Pairs of handwritten capital letters that can be easily mistaken are F and T, L and S, M and W and more, depending on individual handwriting styles. Another danger area can be combinations of lower-case letters  i, m, n, u, w which can be indistinguishable when written quickly, and look like a zig-zag line. You can add a, e, o, v and r to this list with some handwriting styles, and a t where the cross is faint can look like l. Just think of the possibilities! Sometimes a name will be mis-copied as a more common one that looks similar; Hubert has never been a common name, but the similar-looking Herbert used to be very popular and is often worth a try if your Hubert is proving elusive. I have also found David appearing as Daniel - Daniel was  much the more common of the two in 19th century England (although the reverse was true in Wales).

Once typewriters and computers are involved, you need to look at the kinds of mistake you make with a keyboard, which are quite different from the ones you make with a pen. I once spent ages looking for the death entry of someone with the unusual surname Quarmby, in the Olden Days when we only had index books, no snazzy databases, fuzzy matches and the like. In the end I found it by accident, only because it happened to be at the top of the page - as QQUARMBY. This was a 1975 entry, and the GRO indexes had been prepared using computer technology since 1969. There seems to be no automated procedure to identify improbable letter combinations like this, which are clearly the result of keying errors; even in the most recent GRO indexes that you can see online (2006 births and deaths on FindMyPast) you will find a number of people called WILLLIAMS (sic).

Of course you then find an extra layer of errors when records are transcribed for websites. Indexers are often working from film or fiche versions of records, which may be hard to read. I don't want to worry you, but by the time you search for a birth, marriage or death online, the name might have been written or keyed up to five times, with five opportunities to get something wrong. But, bad as it sounds, only a small proportion of names are wrong in records and indexes; in my years of experience of researching my own family history and helping other people with theirs, I have fonnd that most people find most of what they are looking for, most of the time.


 

What is your 'real' name'?

I'm always intrigued when people talk about a person's 'real' name, as though it is something fixed, like your eye colour or your fingerprints. But if you think about it, your name is just a label that is attached to you, usually at birth, by someone else. The name chosen for you is usually defined at least partly by convention, and partly the choice of the parents, but it's still a label. It is probably more accurate to call it your given name, and the convention in the English-speaking world is that you have a surname, which is your family name, and one or more first names. And that's pretty much it, at if you are male. If you are a female, you are generally expected to adopt your husband's surname when you marry, but you don't have to. The world in general is likely to assume that you have changed your name on marriage, but it's still up to you. Some American women adopt their husband's surname, and keep their maiden surname too, as in Hillary Rodham Clinton, but few British women do this. Among British women, Scottish women are much better than English ones at hanging on to their maiden names, in official records at least.

So far so good, but as genealogists often discover, many of our ancestors cannot be found because they are not listed under the name that we expect. Leaving aside mis-spellings and mis-transcriptions, there are many explanations for this, and it's important to realise that there was no reason for most name changes to be recorded officially until relatively recently. Even today, to the best of my knowledge, English common law is still perfectly happy with the notion of unofficial name-changing, provided it is not for any fraudulent purpose. In practice, however, your bank, the Passport Office, the Driving and Vehicle Licencing Authority and a host of other organizations take a different view, and insist on some documentary proof. But if you look back to the 19th century our ancestors would have encountered few situations where they needed to produce official documents, so the question of proving identity simply did not arise. If someone asked your name, they would, on the whole, accept whatever you told them without question. So the name on a person's marriage certificate can be different from the name on their birth certificate for all sorts of reasons; for example someone born before their parents married and  registered under their mother's surname would grow up using their father's surname. Similarly, someone brought up by a stepfather would be very likely to use his surname too. I have even come across some people in these situations who sometimes used one surname, and sometimes the other, for no particular reason.

Then there are people who make a deliberate choice to change their name, again, for a variety of reasons. Some people simply don't like the name their parents chose for them, and pick one that is more to their liking; others prefer their middle name to their first name and just swap the order. I have a friend who uses his middle name, and whose wife didn't like any of her three Christian names and was known to her friends by a different name altogether; when they got married some of the guests thought they had gone to the wrong church because they didn't recognize the 'correct' names on the order of service! Then there are people who have been adopted, and are given a completely new name. If you think about your own friends and family there are probably quite a few who don't use the name that is on their birth certificate, for all kinds of reasons. Now think about your ancestors: why would they be any different?

Changing your name officially by deed poll or by statutory declaration has become very popular in recent years, and there is an interesting feature about this on the BBC website That's going to be fun for the genealogists of the future! It won't be easy to trace through official records, either, because there is no central registration of legal changes of name in England and Wales. If you want to enroll your change of name with the Supreme Court, and thereby create a permanent official record, it costs extra, and most people decide not to bother. I sometimes have to deal with enquiries about changes of name in the course of my job, mainly from family historians, and it is sometimes difficult to persuade them that there may be no paper trail for them to follow. But just in case you are on the trail of one of the minority of name changes that is in the official records, there is a useful guide on The National Archives website.

 

Fearless Females: she's called ... what?

One of the joys, and sometimes one of the pitfalls, of family history research in Scotland is the traditional naming pattern. This can work to your advantage; if you know the names of a couple's children, you can make an educated guess as to their parents' names, especially if they helpfully include family surnames as middle names. The downside is that use of this pattern can result in several people with the same name, tricky for the genealogist. In real life, the bearers of these identical names, and their nearest and dearest, made extensive use of nicknames and diminutives, to avoid confusion. (Note to ancestors: it might have helped avoid confusion for you, but it does quite the opposite for us. If you are thinking of being an ancestor again, could you give some thought to this, please?).

I know what the current and recent versions are - my cousin Helen is always called Ellen, and my aunt of the same name was always Ella. For the generations beyond living memory you just have to keep an open mind. One of the most popular female names in Scottish families, including mine, is Isabel, and this occurs in all kinds of variations - Isa, Izzy, Belle, Bella and so on. Sometimes you will find them in the census, where pet names and nicknames are sometimes used, and where rest of the details are enough to confirm you have the right person. My favourite of these is the example above, the Black family at 32 Orr Street, Glasgow in 1861,  where the mother, Janet was the sister of my great-great grandmother. Their daughter's given name was Isabella, but she appears here as 'Ezybbean'. It could just be the result of poor handwriting, but I like to think that it was an affectionate nickname.

Another female, in a completely different branch of my family, is a good example of another Scottish naming habit, of which we Glaswegians are particularly fond. That is the practice of creating a female name by adding 'ina' to the end of a male name, so I have a second cousin called Williamina, known as Wilma, and a great-aunt Alexandrina, known as Ina. That's the problem; everyone in Glasgow has an aunt Ina, and unless you know whether this is preceded by Robert, Thomas, David, Hugh or whatever, she can be hard to find! Great aunt Alexandrina was the third and last child in her family, all daughters, and they may have known that this was going to be the last baby, we'll never know, and the last chance for great-grandpa Alexander to have a child named after him. His wife's uncle, Matthew Warnock, was also the father of daughters, but no sons, in his case 7 of them. And yes, you guessed it, his youngest daughter was named Matthewina after him.

It was a sad story, and this time his poor wife Susan certainly knew in advance that this would be their last child, because Matthew, a merchant seaman, was drowned at sea, just before Christmas 1894, when she was about 6 months pregnant. His ship, the SS Abydos, foundered off the Isle of Man, with the loss of all hands. I can't imagine how the poor woman must have felt, left on her own with six daughters, 3 of them under 10, and a baby on the way. She kept the family together, somehow, and in 1901 she, her widowed mother and the five younger daughters are all living together in Dorset Street, Glasgow. the little one, now aged 7, appears as Martha, and she seems to have used this name for the rest of her life. Can't say I blame her.

'Funny Names' in the New Penny Magazine 1899

I found this little gem of an article in an issue of  'The New Penny Magazine', published by Cassells & Company.   It continues: 

There is, indeed, a good deal of humour in the Somerset House registry, the fun consisting in an odd or barbarous collocation of names. For hours the eye of the clerk will roam over reams of dull propriety in such names as Henry Wilson, George Williams, or Samuel Smith, and then the face of the clerk will be covered with a smile as he comes across 'Ether' for the front name, attached to the surname of 'Spray'. It may seem strange, but is certainly true, that entered in the books is 'foot-bath', which must be written in capitals, 'FOOT-BATH' as really the name of a fellow-creature. 'River Jordan' is another case in point...Mr Anthistle had a daughter to name, and he must be forgiven for giving her the Christian names 'Rose Shamrock'. 'Rose Shamrock Anthistle' is a young lady whose names must please any patriotic man. Another happy father who gave his innocent offspring the names 'Arthur Wellesley Wellington Waterloo Cox' behaved rather unfairly to the infant, as he pledged him to a career of greatness. 

I couldn't resist searching FreeBMD to see if these were genuine, and indeed they were. A little poetic licence was in play in the case of the first, where the only example I found was Rose Foot Bath, born in 1840 and married in 1863, whose surname was Bath, and Foot was her middle name, with no hyphen. The others all checked out OK, though, and there were even TWO young ladies called Rose Shamrock Anthistle, both of whom found favour with patriotic young men - well they both got married, at least!