Spellings of surnames: finding the variants
Why one family appears under several spellings, and how to search for all of them.
Spelling was not fixed for most of history, and for many people it did not matter. Someone who could not write relied on others to record their name, and each recorder spelt what he heard. A family can appear as Swords, Soards and Swards in three consecutive censuses without anyone changing anything.
Common patterns
- Silent and doubled letters: Smith, Smythe; Philips, Phillips.
- Vowel shifts: Reid, Reed, Read; Stuart, Stewart.
- Prefixes: Mac and Mc, O' and Ó, Van and Fitz are sometimes dropped, added, or joined to the name (McDonald and Donald).
- Endings: -son and -sen, -ez and -es, -ski and -sky, -mann and -man.
- Handwriting: an old capital S can look like an L, and a long s like f, so indexing errors are common.
How to search
Begin with the sound. Write down how the name would be said and list the ways a clerk might spell it. Then use wildcards if a database allows them, such as Sm?th*. Try searching by first name and place with the surname left blank. Indexers sometimes get names wrong, so browse the original page when you can.
Use the census file
Each of our surname pages lists similar spellings that appear in the 2010 Census file, along with their counts. If a variant has a lot of people, it is probably an old, established form rather than a typing mistake.