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?