I just came aware of a situation where the parents (and ancestors) spell their name “Rodgers” and the children spell it “Rogers”. It gets kind of confusing trying to connect new relatives into the family. Anyone else run into this?
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I can’t imagine that there are many people who haven’t ran into this if they have been doing genealogy for more than a few weeks. I make use of the Alt Name fact to record spelling variations. I try to use the spelling found on any birth documents such as certificates, baptism or christening records, etc. as the primary name. If I can find those above, then I have to decide which was most credible for their birth name.
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my Yeomans of New Jersey dropped the “s” when they moved to Illinois - no idea why
So @DLPolzin --the question is-- did the children deliberately change the name???
I have just one line that there was a spelling change-- Mom gave me the OLD WORLD pronunciation of the surname for one of my ancestors ( I had to figure out how to spell it) BUT I don’t know if they changed it or it was changed at the PORT OF ENTRY to the States ( between 1830-1850)…
I have worked with several people over the years who said the kids deliberately changed the name–some said that Dad and son got into a big fight and parted ways permanently–others said that there were just too many people/ relatives with the same name in an area so they changed Ben Franklin Neal to Ben Franklin Nealey…
As kfunk indicated, a lot of the time the person didn’t change the name, the official filling out the document wrote it how they thought it should be ( Rodgers/ Rogers) and in the case of Germans, Italians etc sometimes they had to figure out how to spell it-- my RAPP ancestor was recorded as RAAB, KRAPP, and CRAPE on 3 different documents in less than 10 years ( before 1870) and Schulte is any variation of
Schultz you can think of–same goes for ROTAN-- they say there are over 30 different variations ( RHOTEN, WROTAN) etc)…
Where I have found a lot of surname changes was while researching lines in West Virginia— a lot of the women I’ve researched had out of wedlock kids as early as 1845-- sometimes the birth info ( IF FOUND) and early census has the mother’s maiden name as the child’s surname and as a young adult the kid changes to his father’s surname— other times, the birth info ( IF FOUND) and early census has the mother’s married name (hubby died 5 years before kid was born) as the child’s surname and the next census will have the surname of their actually father — no telling what their surname was after that–could be either one-- of course this same type of scenario would be used by someone who committed a crime or a woman trying to escape an abusive spouse…
Names were not changed at the port of entry into the US. This is an old wives’s tale. The passenger lists you can find on the Ellis Island site were completed as passengers embarked.
Some immigrants americanized their names after living in the US and other ones were illiterate and had no clue how to spell their names.
But passengers had exactly the same names when they got off as they did when they got on.
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