Genealogy: Finding Your Folks

Was 'Lizer' really Grandma's name?

By Judy Fowler Kilgore
Genealogy Columnist

Judy Fowler Kilgore is the religion editor and genealogy columnist for The Citizen. She regrets that time does not permit her to do personal family research for others. She may be reached at jkilgore@thecitizennews.com or jodiek444@aol.com.

Last week's contributor brought up a topic which bears some discussion, especially if you are just beginning your genealogy research. The topic is spelling and it can bring nightmares into your research, if you let it.

Now, I admit to being a picky speller, a condition brought about by years of teaching English, spelling grammar, punctuation, etc. to school children. But, in genealogy, there's a time to be picky and a time to ignore everything you've ever learned about spelling.

The first thing you have to do when you begin genealogy is imagine yourself back in time to the days when few people could read or write. It was nothing to be ashamed of. As I have mentioned before, children were much more useful as farm hands than as scholars and, although most parents wanted their children to be educated, it sometimes was not possible. Many went through their entire lives without being able to sign their names.

Their "mark," usually an "X" was perfectly sufficient to do business, sign deeds and take care of other official matters. When these records were transcribed by clerks in the courthouses, usually from verbal transmissions, names came out as the clerk heard them or, sometimes, as the common spelling of the name as he knew it. This held true for marriage licenses, deeds, wills, and other official papers where we find our ancestors' names.

But, this does not necessarily mean this was the way your ancestors' names were supposed to be spelled. Southern people (and even some of those ol' Yankees) often added sounds to names which were not actually in the spelling. The most common was to add an "er" when a name actually ended in "a." Thus, Eliza came out "Elizer," Emma came out "Emmer," and Louisa came out "Loueezer." Both given names and surnames were affected by this quirk. Boyd, is seen as "Boid, Boide, and Boyed." Johnson was seen with a "t" and without it. Even among family members, surnames were spelled differently, depending on the writer's whim. In the early days of research, BC (before computers), seasoned researchers knew to look for name variations when searching records, and particularly when searching through an index. This held even more true when searching census records.

Some census takers weren't as literate as they thought themselves to be and it was a real nightmare to pore over census records looking for a name you knew was there but that somehow had been mutilated by a sloppy census taker. We searched and found some of what we were looking for, but often missed the mutilated name. We are taught never to change a record and those names we did find, mutilated or not, went into our files as they appeared in the records.

While this still holds true and you must still search for all name variations, the Internet and computers have brought us a whole new problem. You want people to be able to find your research online, but the name was misspelled or spelled oddly in the records. An Internet search would never turn up "Lizer Boide." So, what do you do?

Fortunately, our computer genealogy programs allow us to take care of this problem and still allow people to find us with very little difficulty. You use the "notes," "memo," or "detail" function on your program to explain the name variations.

Here is how I handle it. I put the name of the person as I believe it was supposed to be: Eliza Boyd. Then, in my memo, I add a note that the marriage record spelled her name as Lizer Boide. I may have other records where it was spelled even another way and all are noted. But the main place that would come up on a search would be listed as Eliza Boyd. Unless your surname or given name was consistently spelled in the unusual way, I think it is safe to assume that the name was usually spelled the common way.

Another time you would make an exception would be if you actually knew the person and he or she told you how to spell his name. Or you found correspondence from this person and the name was spelled in an unusual manner. An example of this is in one of my mother's aunts, a triplet. She and her sisters were listed in our records as Molly, Polly and Dolly.

But - hold on a minute. I found a letter from "Dolly" written in 1932 and she spelled her name "Dollie." That was good enough for me. I changed my records accordingly.

Another example is my dear late aunt who went her entire life letting people believe her first name was "Martha." Just before she passed away, she instructed me to go through some of her personal papers to find something for her. When I did, much to my surprise I came across her birth certificate which listed her first name as "Mattie." She had always told me she was named after her grandmother, Mattie Blake, but I never could figure it out. This answered my questions.

However, we know that Mattie was often a nickname for Martha. Perhaps she was given the nickname when she was meant to have the formal name. We will never know. But I had to change all my records to reflect the name of Mattie, giving an explanatory note about the other name. You have to be flexible when it comes to spelling and genealogy and just use common sense. If you don't you're going to drive yourself crazy before you're all done.

But then ... genealogy is never done, is it? Someone wrote last week asking about the genealogy of the Rivers family in Fayette County and I had little information on them. If any of you would like to contribute something, I may do them in a future column. They connect to my Boyds.

I welcome all letters and e-mails about genealogy and info on south metro Atlanta families. Send them to The Citizen, Drawer 1719, Fayetteville, GA 30214; e-mail jkilgore@thecitizennews.com or jodiek444@aol.com.

Any letters and/or e-mails I receive are subject to being used in the column.

Until next week, happy hunting!