WHAT'S IN A NAME?

You can always tell who "newbies" in genealogy are because of their insistence of the "right" spelling of their name. Those of us who have been researching for a long time understand that although our name may be McCammon now, two generations back our family might have used the name MacCammon, or McCummin, or Cummings .... one just never knows. Strange things happen to names in genealogy. All we can be sure of is the spelling of our own name.

We genealogists are so dependent on indexes. And if we don't find a name we are looking for, we get really agitated. Often times the name really is there, but we just don't recognize it. Here's an example:

A bunch of government reports were created by on-the-scene inquirers who were attempting to get the facts right about the "bloody Kansas" period. These reports were taken down by hand and at some point retyped and put into print. There was no index made at the time. Later - about 1980 or so - a fellow decided to index them, which was a wonderful gift to genealogists and to me personally. I had a family who lived through that time and reports from a number of family members were taken. The name as it came down to my great-grandmother was Corel. However, we know that her father William and his brother Joshua both used a variation of Corel. Our William was Corel and Joshua was Corell. Who knows which is right - that is, who changed it? We will never know, but in researching we have to be open to the fact that our name may not always have been what we think it was.

Anyway, in this wonderful index I found my family listed as follows: Corel, Correll, Corell, Carroll, Carol, Corl, Curl, Carll, Care, Carles, Carl and Coral. What does this prove? First of all, on behalf of indexers please don't blame an indexer for making a mistake in reading a name. The difficulty usually starts with the person who wrote the name in the first place! Anyway, never discount a name because it is spelled or sounds differently from what you think it should.

Now if you don't find the name you are looking for in an index, first do the following - I call it "Conjugating Names:" Switch the name using different vowels. Here's an example from my own family. The name as I knew it to be was Lahay. When I couldn't find it where it should have been in an 1850 census, taking the vowels as "A, E, I, O, U and sometimes Y" I was prepared to look for Lahay, Lehay, Lihay, Lohay, Luhay and Lyhay" I found old Toussaint LaHay listed under LIHAIS." If I had not been methodical in changing vowels, I never would have found him.

Just as an aside, his kids all carried French given names and he was from St. Genevieve County, Missouri. They were French Canadians and Catholics. In tracing him back the Catholic Church records did a fine job and ultimately it was found that one of his ancestors came from Ireland with the name of LaHay but it got changed through the years of living in the Quebec area.

Now, I also have another option. Because new researchers today haven't had to go through the machinations of using the soundex to find their families, they can be totally unaware of it and its value. The soundex grouped letters together that sounded alike. (I won't go into how it was used "back in the old days") The groupings were this: Group 1 - BFPV; Group 2 - CSKGJQXZ; Group 3 - DT; Group 4 - MN.

If you can't find the Puckett family in an index, try Buckett (it is unlikely that either F or V would be used). If you are looking for a Mason, try Nason. A Tucker might be a Drucker.

It doesn't only happen to last names, although it is the last names that give us problems in the index. Be careful with first names. Suppose you are looking at an index for Olive Ryland. If you don't find her, take a look at the Clive Ryland that is listed. The handwritten record looks for the world like Olive to me because that it what it is supposed to be, but to the indexer it looked a whole lot like Clive -- and sure enough, when I looked at the original record it certainly COULD HAVE BEEN Clive. My Chester Stevens is in the FamilySearch index as Jheotes Stevens. The only reason I found him is that I knew the composition of his family, and the FamilySearch index does have the rest of his family right. But Chester and his son Chester Junior are both listed as the Jheotes Stevenses. Can I get FamilySearch to change the index? No, but that is a different story altogether.

So for you "newbies," I encourage you to try these little tricks when you are hunting for your families. It just might help you clamber over some of your brick walls!

And as an existential question, I'd like an answer: Rebecca Corel married Giles Parman. When she died, her tombstone reads Rebecca Carl Parman, and subsequent family members all know her maiden name as Carl. What WAS her real name?

McCONNELLS, McCAMMONS & DOBBINSES

This is a picture of Miss Maud McConnell and her sister Lillie’s children posing on donkeys. The oldest, Hazel, is in the middle, and her brothers Floyd and John are on either side of her. It is true, the boy in front looks like a girl, but in those days boys stayed in dresses until they were out of diapers. I’ll make an educated guess that this photo is dated about 1894. Every photo tells a story. Today I’m going to tell you about this one.

Maud always went by her middle name. According to her family bible, she didn’t like her first name, Susan! Her parents, John B. McConnell and Frances Narcissa Wright McConnell, lived in Barren County, Kentucky and eight of their nine children were born there. The last child, Harrie Uberto was born in Texas. As often happened in those days, only three of their children survived to adulthood, Lillie, Maud and Harrie Uberto. About 1880, the McConnell family moved from Kentucky to Kossee, Texas, where they bought some farmland. Lillie shortly met and married a railroad engineer, Benjamin Franklin McCammon, and the McCammons moved to Colorado City, (now west Colorado Springs) where he worked for the Midland Railroad.

In 1893, Ben was killed in a railroad crash, leaving Lillie with the three little kids. Lillie’s parents, her 17 year old sister Maud and little brother “Bert” came up from Texas to help her out. Maud chose to stay in Colorado to help her sister with the children. Her folks and Bert went back home.

Maud lived with Lillie and the kids until the little ones were in school. At that point, Maud, now 20, went to work at a bookstore in old Colorado City. In those days, almost every Sunday there was a band concert at the local parks. It was a social event, and once the concert ended the band members mingled with the audience.

It was at one of these band concerts at Stratton Park in Colorado Springs that Maud McConnell met a cornet player by the name of Scott Dobbins, who in the summers played in the Midland Railroad Band. During the rest of the year, he lived on the Dobbins ranch in Las Animas, Colorado and played in the Las Animas band. Maud herself was an accomplished pianist and apparently she and Scott discovered they made sweet music together. On December 28, 1898, Maud and Scott married in Colorado Springs at the home of her sister. Maud and Scott then moved to the ranch. In 1904 she and Scott had their first child, a daughter Dorothy, and in 1908 they added Scott Jr. to their family. Shortly before Scott’s birth, they sold the ranch and moved into town.

For those of you who know our family, you will know that my father was Scott Jr. When he was in his mid 20s my dad came to California, partly to do some investigation for a Colorado mining group but mostly to stay in touch with my mother, who had come west with her family from Colorado Springs a few months earlier than Scott did. They married in October of 1932.

A few years before he died Dad and I were talking about what life was like in Las Animas. He said that his folks always had a piano in their house, and during the freezing winters all the neighbors would bring their musical instruments to the Dobbins house and spend the afternoon making music for their own enjoyment, my grandma Maud on the piano and grandpa Scott on the cornet. A neighbor taught my dad to play the banjo, and other neighbors and relatives filled in with guitars, trombones, and clarinets. Those who didn’t play an instrument became the “choir.”

I was born in California in 1935. Grandma Maud began making yearly trips to visit our family. Because I was so young when she came, I really didn’t know who she was and I referred to her as “that lady.” Eventually “Lady” became my name for this grandma. Unfortunately she died in 1940, and I don’t have any real recollection of her. But I do have this picture of me, my mom and Lady taken in 1938, and when I think of her, it is this picture that always comes to mind.

For those of you who are my Dobbins cousins, my grandma Maud is also your grandma. To our children, she is their great-grandma, and to our grandchildren she is their great-great grandma. So when your grandkids hit fourth grade and are required to produce a genealogy of their family, you can at least show them this picture, tell them this story and then, if I am still living, I can fill you in on all the rest. This is, of course, the whole purpose of genealogy – passing the family history on down through the generations.