Genealogy Research - What's In A Name?

[Kirk Monroe]

Have you hit a stumbling block in your search for ancestors? Is the
given (last) name you're looking for one that could be easily spelled
differently in another language? Try varying the spelling of the given
name you are researching - sometimes it can make a world of
difference.
For example, we were researching the name "Lesh", but couldn't find
anything. Until one day, after scanning some of the Ancestry.com
forums, we noticed a German spelling of the name - Loesch - and the
flood gates opened so much so that we found ancestors back to the
Revolutionary War, which helped to prove our rights to membership in
the Daughters of the American Revolution. You can also use the name
"Shrader" as an example, which has multiple spellings - Schrader,
Schraeder, Schroeder, etc.
So...why did these names change from generation-to-generation?
One reason can be attributed to immigrants themselves. They made a
conscious decision when arriving in America that they were going to
simplify their name, give it a more "American" spelling, or maybe they
wanted to distance themselves from a troubled past.
Another, and equally prevalent, reason was due to record keeping. We
haven't always lived in the age of computers and immigration records
were not always 100% accurate. Not because the immigrant officer at
Ellis Island was lazy, but because they were trying to process as many
people as possible and they would spell names phonetically and, if
you've ever studied a foreign language, you know letter combinations
in one language were usually trimmed to a single letter sound in
"American" English. For example, 'ae' could turn into an 'a', an 'ei'
into an 'i' or 'sch' into 'sh', especially with German names.
Another common problem with records of the time, and census records
are another good example of this, is the flowery, and sometimes,
illegible handwriting that would cause people to guess at how a name
was spelled, which could lead to, though surely unintentional,
spelling errors.
As if spelling changes weren't enough, some people wouldn't record
their formal names consistently. For example, we were reviewing census
records and found a person had recorded their name three different
ways. Once with a full first and last name, but no middle; another
with a full first and last name and a middle initial; and lastly, we
found another record with first and middle initials and a full last
name.
So... The bottom line when researching your ancestors is to keep an
open mind and make sure to try all of the possibilities (no matter how
strange they might seem). You never know what you're going to find!!

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