What’s in a name?
Well, a lot or not so much, if you are a genealogist. Sounds like a contradiction, but as family
historians, we tend to have a love/hate relationship with the names of the
ancestors we are researching. One of the
very first lessons a budding genealogist learns is that they are going to find
their family names in many forms, some that will even be totally
unrecognizable. Given the information
that before the introduction of wide-spread public education in the early 20th
century, many of our ancestors were, at best, semi-literate, this makes a great
deal of sense. How could someone who
could not read and/or write correct the bureaucrat who was filling his/her name
out on a sheet of paper? In 2014, we
take offense at the telemarketer who cannot pronounce our name the way we do
when reading it off a sheet of paper. In
1854, that differing pronunciation ultimately may have become an accepted
spelling of our name.
Of course those of us who are researching ancestors of some
ethnic groups- Russian, Polish, German, Italian, etc, are used to and expect
that name variations and changes will occur, whether it be a single letter or a
full re-tooling of the name. The
motivations of our ancestors to change their names when they arrived in the
United States were varied and many.
(It’s a myth that officials at United States ports changed names FOR
immigrants) The desire to assimilate and
become more “American” played a large role in the decision to change a name
from one form to another. What then, of
the thousands of Irish immigrants whose names also changed? Was there ever a time when names like
“Murphy”, “Sullivan” or “McNamara” did not seem common in this country?
In my own personal research history, early on I could easily
accept the variations I stumbled across of my own surname: WALSH, WALCH, WELSH, WELCH. A tougher sell was the ancestor whose
“properly spelled” Irish surname was HEHIR, but who had relatives in the United
States who changed the name to AYERS.
Since then I have encountered countless spelling variations of hundreds
of Irish names. Some are easily
understood and accepted without much explaining. Others take a bit more arm-twisting.
I once did some work for a client whose American surname was
CANFIELD. Not a name you hear every day
but certainly not uncommon. His family
had 100% Irish origins, but after 25 years of research by several professional
genealogists, no trace of his family in Ireland could be found. I was hired to see if modern technology and
access to records would make a difference in acquiring any new
information. I examined some baptism
records in the area where the family lived in the United States, and noticed
dispersed amongst the CANFIELD baptisms were a few using the name
CANTWELL. There appeared to be some families
who used the names interchangeably (especially in the first few years after
their emigration to this country), and I even found an example or two of my
client’s own ancestors identified as CANTWELL.
Checking the Irish records, I was able to find a likely baptism for my
client’s ancestor under the surname CANTWELL.
The dates matched up with what was already known, as did the parents’
names, including the mother’s maiden name.
The only difference was that the surname was CANTWELL, not
CANFIELD. I don’t know to this day if
this client was sold on the probability of the name change, but it was
compelling enough for me to alter how I approach the search for families,
especially in records originating in Ireland.
In the case of Irish church records, often the priest
recording the information was the only fully literate person in the area. He may have used Latin or English to record
the records of the rituals of the church- baptism, marriage, burial. Sometimes the names used were forms of old
Irish spellings, sometimes anglicized, sometimes a combination of the two. Consistency does not seem to have been a
priority. Just because your name was
spelled “Conners” on one child’s baptism record does not mean the next child’s
record might not be under the name “Cahir”.
Using the context of the record (the clues surrounding it) help
determine whether the record actually refers to our ancestor. Often this is a leap of faith we have to take
in the absence of supporting evidence.
If I were researching someone from Poland, there would be very
little debate as to whether a name change might have occurred. I would go into the project prepared for this
and fully expecting to make determinations as to whether a surname I was
looking at was an acceptable variation.
I would use additional genealogical skills to determine if the record I
was looking at pertained to the person I was researching. Why would it not make sense to adopt this
same approach when researching families of Irish origins? Just because all those Murphys, Kellys and
Conners look familiar to us doesn’t mean it was always so. More about using the contexts of records next
time.
