Help: The same family members spell their surname name differently? Now what?

Question

I'm following lines of decent from a 2x great aunt.  She married into the Means family.  I'm deep in this rabbit hole and notice the name "Means" is spelled "Meanes" between sibblings, and what is  worse, some gravestones are spelled "Meanes"

So, if some gravestones are marked "Meanes", does that mean court documents are marked "Meanes" ?  Do I have to go back and change the last names of those family members who spelled their name wrong?  That will mess up everything, wont it?  

Here are the links to the same profile: Thomas Lawson Means (or Meanes)

WikiTree:

https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Means-2422

Family Search:

https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/51799839/thomas-lawson-meanes  

Find A Grave

https://www.familysearch.org/tree/person/details/LD6Q-7WF

 (notice parents and siblings last names are spelled differently)  but the gravestone clearly says "Meanes"

Comments

What spelling do the earliest documents use?  The alternate spellings can go in "Current Last Name", and "Other Last Names".

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Personally, I have never gotten overly concerned about different spellings of a name. In fact, in some very old church documents I have seen the same name spelled two different ways in the same document.

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This is driving me crazy as I work with the Germans of the Bachman Valley Maryland for my one place study. Some make a conscious choice to Americanize their surname. Others have the change thrust upon them by census takers etc. A will I looked at recently had the surname as Foreman but the guy signed his name on it Fuhrman. Kaltriders who went south to Maryland from York County PA decided to be Caltriders. There can be seven variants of the same family name in one church's records. The opposite happened too when Irish kids got baptized in the German church and Sullivan became Sulphin

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It is not unusual for names to transition spelling from generation to generation with one sibling staying with one spelling and another choosing another spelling. My maiden name is Gilchrist. I have cousins who chose to spell it Gilchrest and Gilcrease. Go back in time a few generations and the spelling was Kilcrease. Just do the best to you can to determine a "Last Name at Birth" and perhaps document alternative spellings you might encounter in records and on gravestones. If your family was anything like mine, the records have many variations. People making the records, such as censuses, often spelled the name the way they heard it not because of the way the person they were questioning could or would spell it. I know people say use the "earliest" record as the best choice, but I tend to think that the name "engraved in stone" at their time of death might be the spelling of the surname the person actually used in their lifetime. Or maybe it was just the way whoever ordered the stone thought it should be spelled. Who knows? We all make our best guess based on the sources. It's good that WikiTree has that data field for "other last names." I use it for alternate spellings.

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- hi  David Draper

 - You could use a ''space'' page to record your findings , as I did , = Andrewartha Name Study. = together with other items , such as = Ahnentafel Andrewartha - Name Tree - 4098 =

have a look - - john.a

Answer 1

Hi David.  It isn't that unusual for different members of the same ancestral line to spell their surname differently.  You sometimes see it when different branches of the family settled in different areas, or when immigrant families sometimes tried to anglicize the surname.  You might also find different spellings in old family bibles or church records before literacy was common -- i.e., the person who entered the data simply wrote the name as it sounded to him/her.  It doesn't necessarily mean there's a right and a wrong.

In the absence of anything authoritative, I would do as Melanie suggested -- use the earliest record as the birth name spelling, and if the person used other spellings, use those as Current Name or Other last name.  I also usually include a Research note highlighting the inconsistencies and explaining it as best I can.

Comments

Thank you for your responses.  It just dawned on me that Find A Grave entries and Family Search entries could be WRONG!  The possibility exists that this guy isn't even a relative.   I don't have the skills needed to dig the dirt up on real and proper source documents!  I was relying on Find a Grave and Family Search to do the research for me.  

My best approach now is to avoid adding a profile if there is a conflict.  I can't delete this guy's profile.  Maybe I can just remove him from as a child of my family and let him float in WikiTree cyberspace, or probably just leave it alone, and wait for a duplicate profile to be made by another Wikitreer.  

Somebody will come in the future and say "this profiler screwed up the name, I'm going to change it"! Then another Wikitreer will change it back....a vicious cycle.

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That's why I was suggesting adding a research note.  Let those future viewers know that you found whatever records you could find, noticed the inconsistent spellings, and were unable to resolve it conclusively without more evidence.  You might also explain your rationale for using the spelling you did.  It may save those future researchers (or you, if you come back to it later) the time and trouble of retracing all your steps.

Answer 2

I have a similar situation, and a similar surname. It can be spelled Mead, Meade, Mede, Meed, and many more. I enter it as it says in the documentary evidence, which generally changes from Mead to Meade to Mede as I get further back in time. There wasn't any concept of correct spelling. Sometimes the name could be spelled two or three different ways in the same will, for example.

Comments

I agree, I see this frequently in earlier wills. There was no consistency.

It doesn't help if we are able to find entries in baptismal registers: spelling varied  from entry to entry for children from the same parents. This isn't just a problem in the earlier periods. Yesterday I was working on a couple who had children from 1796-1817. They were entered as Faulkner, Falkner, Falkener, Faulknor.

Answer 3

I'm a little late to this thread, but one of the lines of descent in my wife's tree is the Stedman family. They are sometimes spelled Steadman in legitimate documents such as marriage bonds, etc. However, I know for certain the surname is Stedman, because the family has been traced back to England in the fifteenth century.

Stedman is the predominant spelling. But Steadman is not infrequent, although I don't recall seeing any gravestones with that spelling.

Another family is the Seagraves family. From which derives Segrove, Segrave, Seagrave, and even the NC town Seagrove. In that particular case, I have no idea which name is the correct one. I suspect it's Segrove, but I can't prove that.

In some cases, you will never know what the correct name is. You can even find family lines where the name changes over time and the new spelling was generally adopted by all the descendants.

It's an irreducible conundrum.

Comments

It's not a conundrum per se, but we made it so by wanting names to have a unique spelling, and worse, base identity on this spelling, against the grain of evidence that a "correct" spelling does not exist, most of the time.

A fact well known by Lao Zi, who unfortunately cannot be entered in WikiTree because BC. "Name able to name, not constant name."

Answer 4

Answer for France, maybe a little biased, but my guess it's the same everywhere.

The notion of a name as needing a fixed spelling is quite modern. Bear in mind that in the 1800s, not to go further back in time, most people could not read or write, and had not a clue of how their name should be written, and if they had, were not as picky on the spelling as we are now.

The siblings of my grandfather, in the late 1800s, were recorded at birth under four different spellings.

It's very frequent to have in a single record several different spellings of the family name, and different family members signing with different flavours of the spelling. It was not a problem.

That's why the LNAB as identifier is just a bad design idea (discussed in other threads).