I’ve reviewed factors that are important in determining immigrant ancestors’ names as they were used in their country of origin.

Once the name is known, it can be used in searching for other information about the person—that is, the other genealogic “keys”: date of immigration, date of birth, and town of birth. Further, it is the basis of the search for the person’s original birth, marriage, or death records.

Such searches may be undertaken at local libraries, churches, civil offices, genealogic societies, and other repositories of paper documents, or they may be done online using free or subscription sites like the free Mormon church site FamilySearch (www.familysearch.org) or the subscription site Ancestry.com.

Whatever form the search takes, be forewarned that even though you may think you know the “correct” spelling of an ancestor’s name, it may be misspelled or recorded incorrectly in the documents you are searching.

Awareness of the variations that may be found in the recording of your ancestor’s name can help you to choose alternative spellings that may lead you to his or her records.

Consider these errors to watch out for on records and indices:

Inconsistent spelling on original documents. Many of our ancestors were illiterate. This meant that a name on a record, even an original record, was spelled in whatever way the clerk making out the document thought it should be spelled.

It was not that uncommon for a surname to be spelled differently for siblings born a couple of years apart, if the clerks recording the two births were different.

If a record, as in census documents, was made by someone who spoke a different language than your ancestor, even more variations could be introduced.

Misspelling by computer transcribers. When records are transcribed into online computer databases, the work is done by “indexers” who read the original document and “digitize” the information, so that it can be searched for by a person’s name.

An image of the record is placed online, and some sort of search engine is used for you to enter the name. If the name you enter is in the database, the proper image of your ancestor’s document is displayed.

However, the indexer may not have been an Italian, or German, or Polish speaker and may not have recognized archaic handwriting, so he may have transcribed the name incorrectly. If so, searching with the right name may not yield results!

Misspelling by sound. If the record is one for which an ancestor (even if literate) pronounced his name, but it was written by another person, as in a census or license application, that person may have misheard the name: Andolino for Andolina, Schmitt for Schmidt, etc.

Misspelling by looks. An indexer unfamiliar with archaic handwriting and with foreign names may mistake one lookalike letter for another (u for n, j for i, i for e, etc.).

Switching given and surnames. Immigrants often said their surnames first, as in Alessi Rosa, Wilhelm Anton, etc. An English-speaking clerk or indexer unfamiliar with this custom, and with the names themselves, might write the first name as the surname and vice versa.

The moral of all this is that when you search for an ancestor’s record by name, don’t give up if you don’t get results for a name you know is right. Try spelling the name differently, as it would sound; replace i with e; or try the person’s last name as the first name in the search, etc.

Be flexible. You may be surprised at how some of your ancestors’ names were listed!

Angelo F. Coniglio's 50Plus Author's Page