A rose by any other name would smell as sweet, yes, but is your ancestor Jon or John?

Doing genealogy, we need to understand our ancestors in their own historical context. Names and proper spellings have evolved over time.

With the advent of the computer for record keeping in the 20th century, it became essential to have a one-to-one correspondence between a person and how his or her name was spelled. To a computer, the following pairs are different names: Johnson or Jonson, Macduff or McDuff, Nilson or Nelson, Schmidt or Schmitt.

Naturally, people raised in the computer era want to know the “right way” to spell an ancestor’s name, because the computer thinks there is only one way. Sometimes clients have difficulty with a record, thinking, “that cannot be my ancestor because that is not how my family spells our name.”

However, before computerized record keeping, clerks, priests and other record keepers wrote entries by hand, and searched manually or copied them into an index by hand. So whether Nilsson had one “s” or two was not critical, since Nilsson and Nilson were recognizable as the same when being read by a person. Schmidt and Schmid could be read and understood by a clerk as referring to the same person. One person could have his or her name spelled a variety of ways depending on who kept the record.

This is true for given names as well as surnames. So while Christina and Christiana, are two different names to the computer, either might be written by a clerk on the assumption that anyone reading would know what he meant. The name Johan and Johann also would have been recognized as the same name before computers made us choose. The key is to say the name out loud. Chances are, if it sounds like Johan it is Johan, even with alternate spellings.

Thankfully, FamilySearch uses an excellent “sounds like” feature in search fields. Try it–you will br surprised. If the name sounds like Schmidt, you will get Schmitt, Shmidt, Shmid, and so on.

So, what do you do when you find a birth record where the person and his birthdate and birthplace are what you expected, but the surname or the names of his parents are not spelled as you expected? Chances are, if enough other details match, and if the name would sound the same when spoken, that record might be your ancestor.

Don’t apply computer accuracy to handwritten records made long before the machines made us choose MacDuff or McDuff.