Genealogy

How well do you know your name?

"Her true given name was Charles Harman," Grace Goodman said about her mother. "As a child, I was so embarrassed to say that my parents' names were Charles and George."

Such names can be the bane of every rooter. A surname that has undergone numerous evolutions, a nickname used interchangeably with a given name or simply an atypical birth name can lead a researcher astray.

It would be easy, for example, to assume that a woman would not be named Charles. If no birth certificate could be found for the mother or daughter, it's not farfetched to imagine that a researcher would spin his wheels, trying to determine the "real" identity of Goodman's mother.

I was thrown a curve by the name Eter on an 1850 census return. Her daughter's name was Sendarol. Because the family had not emigrated from another country, their strange names could not be attributed to a foreign language. Eventually I discovered that Eter was short for Henrietta and that the daughter's name was Cinderella. Their peculiar names came courtesy of a creative and spelling-challenged census-taker.

Polly, Molly and Mary were used interchangeably in the 1800s. Sadie, Sudie and Sally were popular derivatives of Sarah. In my family, Magdalena went by Laney, and Eliza Jane was called Lide and Kide. One reader told me that her relative Elizabeth was nicknamed Diddie. Sometimes people who didn't particularly like their given name picked a different one to go by socially while using their birth name on formal and legal documents.

Still, surnames cause the biggest problems in genealogy. Despite an excess of evidence, some researchers reject the possibility that they could be descendants of anyone whose surname is spelled differently.

Fact is, there has never been and never will be a universal way to spell any name.

Sometimes, even into the early 1900s, people didn't spell their surname one way consistently. In one document, my ancestor's surname appeared as Mury, Murry and Murray. Samuel's surname is Murry on his headstone. On the stone of his son Levi, it's Murray.

Government workers get a bad rap for arbitrarily changing immigrants' surnames, but surnames often were modified many times before the immigrant made it to our shores. My great-grandfather's surname morphed from Karchnak to Karchnjak to Karnyak over three generations before the family left Slovakia. His will reads Karnak, and his tombstone says Carnock. Nearby, his son's tombstone says Carnack.

German surnames were among those that really got butchered. Perhaps because of difficulty pronouncing the guttural language, names such as Ulrich became Ullery or Ulery, Oolery and Whoolery. Eicher became Iker and Echard. Puh, Pfau and Buh changed to Poe.

Even simple Irish names underwent modifications. In addition to dropping the "O' " from O'Toole or the "Mc" from McDonnell, the Irish surname Horan became Horn and McGeary turned into McGarry.

Foreign names also were loosely translated into English. Paul Cooper said in an e-mail that his surname means barrelmaker in German. So does Keiffer. In Spanish, he might be called Tonelero.

Schneider is roughly the German equivalent of the English word tailor, so many Schneiders (Snyder, Snider) Americanized their name to Taylor. Likewise, Zimmerman converted to Carpenter and Bruner to Springer.

As with other ethnic groups, Germans lopped off parts of their longer surnames. Snidemueller got shortened to Mueller and eventually Anglicized to Miller.

Wise rooters consider all potential spellings of their surnames. When the trail goes cold, it might be necessary to research the origins and evolutions of a particular surname to learn what possibilities exist.

- Donna Murray Allen welcomes your questions about genealogy and will respond to those of general interest in future columns. Sorry, she can't take phone calls, but you can write to her c/o Floridian, St. Petersburg Times, P.O. Box 1121, St. Petersburg, FL 33731, or e-mail her at rootscolumn@yahoo.com . Or visit her Web site: www.rootsdetective.com.

Learn more about maiden names and military pensions

Maiden names and military pensions, two important aspects of genealogical research, will be the main topics of a seminar given by Donna Murray Allen on Feb. 22 at the St. Petersburg Museum of History. The two-hour event begins at 10 a.m. Cost is $5 for museum members, $10 for nonmembers. Call (727) 894-1052 to reserve a spot.

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