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Hooked on Phonetics . . . The Many Misspellings of our Ancestors’ Names

By Kathy Jones-Kristof | April 20, 2008

From the moment the first European ship hit American soil, our ancestors’ surnames have been cruelly treated by the people inscribing them on parchment, paper and in printer’s ink.  The reason is simple.  Many people didn’t know how to spell them: not the person owning the name, the person writing it or the person setting the type.

The way this problem was dealt with was Phonetics.  If a man didn’t know how to spell a name, he spelled it as it sounded, and every man responsible for recording those names had a different idea how to spell what he heard.  To complicate the matter, many of the people speaking the names and those writing them spoke different languages.  

As a result, when searching for your ancestor’s name, you need to be flexible.  Below are samples of misspelled surnames that were, for the most part, easy to figure out:

I could go on for pages with examples like this.  And though most Phonetic misspellings can be easily interpreted with a little imagination, they can be just as easily missed if you aren’t actively looking for them when searching through a list of surnames.

Now let’s turn to harder-to-find Phonetic misspellings.  These can have you tearing out your hair.  In fact, one did just that to me.  After going through numerous years of property tax lists at a library one day, I happened to notice the name Arebaugh.  How strange, I thought.  That sounds a lot like one of the names I was researching, which was Orbaugh.  The light bulb not only went on over my head, it exploded inside it.  Of course!  Phonetics!  They sound alike!  I had to start all those years of tax lists over from the beginning to look for Arebaugh.  I was tempted to disown the whole family line.

Here are a few other tough Phonetic misspellings that I’ve encountered:

That last one isn’t entirely a Phonetics problem, as you can see.  But it is a situation that you may encounter, so I’ve included it here.  This ancestor of mine came to America named Fitzjarrell, then dropped the Fitz.  After that all his documents were recorded under just the name Jarrell, so I felt safe looking only for that name, along with its Phonetic sidekick, Garrell.  Several years after the Fitz had been severed from his name, I found a document where he again used the name Fitzjarrell.  Horrors!  Now I had to worry what other business had been transacted under his old name that I had missed.  The moral to this story is never assume that an ancestor’s former name is completely dead.

And the moral to this article is a name may have a dozen different ways to spell it and your goal is not to miss any of them.  When I record the data from old documents in my Family File, I always include the name as it was written originally.  It may have been wrong, it may have been Phonetic, or it may have been the right way to spell it all along!

 

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Topics: All Levels of Genealogists |

2 Responses to “Hooked on Phonetics . . . The Many Misspellings of our Ancestors’ Names”

  1. Zona Himmelsbach Says:
    May 10th, 2008 at 6:36 am

    While researching my Himmelsbach ancestors in Buffalo, Erie County, NYS, I found on various databases and documents about 18 misspelling of the HIMMELSBACH surname.

  2. Matthew Combs Says:
    August 10th, 2008 at 6:53 am

    Kathy,

    I have written a software program for the genealogy community called “Surname Suggestion List”. This software helps you find variant spellings and phonetic soundings for surnames, and then assists you in searching the web for genealogy articles relating to your surname and its variants.

    The web page for the software is located at http://home.triad.rr.com/combsfamily/sslmain.html.

    Please take a moment and try out the software. I would be very interested in your feedback.

    Matt Combs
    Lewisville, NC

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