View Article
What's In a Name?
by Val Atkinson
Article ID: 2, First Published: March 2004Being a ‘proper’ genealogist is like being a detective in the ‘Sherlock Holmes’ tradition, finding clues and solving mysteries. It’s about being patient, taking time, and not being bothered if you look silly with your magnifying glass. It’s about wanting to discover and not caring what you find so long as you find it. It’s about using your leisure to sit at a film viewer and get a headache you suffer in silence, and it’s putting your hand in your pocket no expenses spared.
It’s knowing that ‘no man is an island’, and wanting to be part of something glorious and beautiful.
It’s more than names on paper. It’s finding the people and gathering them into families. It’s grafting them into your tree and claiming them as your own. It’s people we come to know and names we recognise.
If I’ve learned anything at all in thirty years of research, I’ve learned the ‘lesson of the surname’.
I never take any name at face value now, and I always think twice. These rules apply no matter
• how attached I am to certain spellings
• how convinced I am that a certain way is the way
• what revered family authority has laid down the ‘spelling law’
• how many times I’ve seen it spelled my favourite way.
An open mind has to be the order of the day for ‘proper’ genealogists.
In days when many people were illiterate, spellings in records very often reflected the vicar’s or the registrar’s idea of what the person said.
Actual examples are TOWNS/TONES/TOANES or MEIN/MEAN/MEEN/MIEN/MAYN.
Another problem is transcriptions of records, and rule of thumb must be ‘check the microfilmed original when possible’.
I’ve seen TONES transcribed as JONES on parish records, GRO indexes, actual certificates, and the Latter Day Saint IGI.
A registrar once sent me a birth certificate indexed as JONES but conceded the name could well be TONES. She asked me to contact her if I found any proof, and I was later able to confirm TONES from the parents’ marriage certificate.
On one marriage entry, the vicar had written the groom’s name as MIEN but the groom had signed himself MEIN. Nothing is impossible, so keep your eyes open.
My most endearing experience is the good old 19th century Durham coal miners’ name GATISS (pronounced GAYTISS).
In 1881 there were some few GATISS entries in Northumberland and Yorkshire, but the vast concentration was in Durham, and many counties were so unfortunate as to have none at all!
I have a dream to see all those GATISS families united at last into one large interrelated coal mining family tree.
I’ve seen it spelled
GATES/GATESS/GATIS/GAITES/GAITESS/GAITERS/GEATES/, and indexed as GATIPS, so these days a name has only to begin with letter ‘G’ to get my full and concentrated scrutiny.
In each of these spellings I can hear the broad flat vowels of the Durham accent coming through. I can see the very well bred vicar from some other less important region listening to the illiterate miner repeat his name for the baptism or marriage entry. I see him puzzling over it, and making a guess.
I like GEATES best of the lot because it shows real ignorance of the local accent. The vicar must have agonised over that one!
What is even stranger is that these multiple spellings often appear over the years for the same family in the same parish transcribed by the same vicar.
All but two of my GATISS people were miners, and I still can’t work out how they managed to break free and become a grocer and an inn keeper. It just doesn’t make sense! (though the inn keeper was previously a miner who became a ‘beer seller’)
In the days when I wasn’t into devious, lateral thinking, and thought a name was just a name I spent five years searching for a marriage of Elizabeth GATES only to discover she was a GATISS. She was just a column away on the GRO indexes but how could I know that when I was making the mistake of thinking ‘straight’?
Staying on the ‘straight and narrow’ won’t get you far in genealogy!
You will be a ‘proper’ genealogist when your mind is so open to family names that you:
• have become suspicious, devious, and lateral
• accept the unexpected as the most expected
• View the impossible as highly probable
• Put the sublime and ridiculous down as daily events
• See the bizarre as the epitome of normality
And you just feel THANKFUL you’ve found them!
