Spelling Doesn’t Count! (in Genealogy)




None of which was relevant to, for example, my 3x great-grandparents James Moran (often Morin, sometimes Moren) and his wife Margaret (sometimes Marguerite) Jamieson (or Jameson, or Jamison), who emigrated from Ireland to Huntley township (Carleton Co., Ontario/Upper Canada) around 1819. They didn’t need driver’s licenses; and they didn’t enjoy a “golden years” retirement on a pension plan. And while Margaret Jamieson may have been (at least according to family lore) literate, James Moran could certainly not sign his name. You know, it’s extremely unlikely that an ancestor had a strong attachment to a certain spelling of his surname, if that ancestor never had occasion to personally spell his own name. 

My suspicion is that people didn’t really care about the spelling of their names until they found themselves positioned as so many points on a modern information grid, with faceless bureaucrats making decisions about licenses and pensions and so on. Which development roughly corresponds to the rise of the presumption (if not the reality) of universal literacy, and literacy is also of course an important factor too. You can’t “misspell” your name, or correct someone else’s “misspelling,” if you don’t know how to spell in the first place. But anyway, and to admittedly vastly oversimplify for the purposes of illustration, it didn’t matter how the parish priest or the local magistrate spelled your name, when you lived in a small “face-to-face” community in Huntley township where everyone of course knew who you were and who the priest or magistrate meant when they recorded your name. It was only when your children and grandchildren had to start sending proofs of documentation to Toronto or Ottawa (for licenses and pensions and so forth) that they started worrying about dotting the i’s and crossing the t’s, which is when a standardized spelling of your surname started to appear.

Probably most of my not-so-distant (within the past two hundred years or so) ancestors lived out their entire lives unburdened by the rules of correct spelling. They themselves never actually spelled out their own names: the spelling of their names was only ever rendered by parish priests and census enumerators. For these folks, “variant” surname spellings were not so much the exception as the rule (which of course tended to multiply the possibilities of variation). Your mileage may vary, of course, depending on the educational levels (which is to say, basically, socioeconomic status) of your ancestors, but certainly you should not expect surname standardization until at least the last quarter of the nineteenth century, if not a generation or two later.   
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