Name Variations
HostGFSJan
GENTREK, April 22, 2002
It's time to talk about YOU. YOUR names, YOUR ancestors, and maybe even some of YOUR brick walls. We're going to talk about names, and how they get mangled. AND, how to find them when they ARE mangled.
We need to remember that surnames were not always used. As populations began to increase, people had to be described in a unique way, so others would know exactly which man named John was the one they were talking about. So people started saying “John the son of the blacksmith,” or “John with the big nose,” or “John who lives by the river” to differentiate one person named John from another who lived in the same village or town.
At first, the names were not always the same. The son of the blacksmith might also have been known as “Martin's son,” especially if there were more than one blacksmith in the town. Eventually governments began to see that there had to be some way to tell one person from another, and surnames became standardized.
There were patronyms ... names derived from the name of the father, such as Martinson.
Then came occupations, so, John who was a blacksmith became John Smith. Henry, who was a Baker, became Henry Baker.
Names also depicted places of origin. Thomas Hill was the Thomas who lived on the hill, and Thomas Wood was the Thomas who lived in the woods.
Names also came from towns and regions. Albert who lived in the city of Eddington, became Albert Eddington, as opposed to Albert who lived in Rutherford, who became Albert Rutherford.
Physical characteristics also became surnames. Not so much here in the US, but in the countries of origin of our ancestors it was quite common. So, in other countries, you will find names that mean, short, tall, fat, large nose, big feet or red hair. Anything that would distinguish a person from another with the same first name was used.
Personal characteristics were also used, such as polite, cheerful, determined, evil, etc.
Some people were named for items with which they were associated. Some that may be familiar would be Star, Fox, Wolf, and the German name ZWEIBEL, which means onion. Still trying to figure that one out! (Maybe his family grew onions?)
Farm names were also taken as surnames. In Scandinavian countries, in German and Poland, the names of the farms or estates where people worked became their surnames. If someone new took over the farm or estate, the name of the farm or estate would not change, but the owner's name would be changed to the name of the farm. This created some confusion at times, since most of the people who worked there also had the same surname. Not to mention a person whose name was JONES, who moved to the WHITE’S farm, then became known as WHITE.
Another confusing thing about names is that in many countries, there was a male and a female version of each surname. So, in Germany, the son of Matthias RODER was named Johannes RODER, but his daughter would be Anna RODERIN. In Polish it's a bit easier, but not much. Jan DOMBROWSKI’S son would be Adam DOMBROWSKI, his wife would be Marya DOMBROWSKA, and his daughter would be Anna DOMBROWSKOWA.
Also, in Polish, when reading records of baptisms, you will find a listing giving the first name of a child, Adam, his father's name, Jan DOMBROWSKI syn Wladyslawa and Halina GOLOMBEWSKA. The mother's name would be listed as Anna zd, (or z) TOPOLEWSKA, ciorka Jana and Katarzyna JASKOTOW. The translation of all of that is simply:
Adam, son of Jan DOMBROWSKI, the son of Wladyslaw DOMBROWSKI and Helen GOLOMBEWSKA DOMBROWSKI. The mother would be Anna (zd) from the home of Jan TOPOLEWSKI and Katherine JASKOTTOPOLEWSKA.
Many countries used different endings for male and female, and you need to be aware of these things when you are looking for records in your ancestor's homeland. You could miss someone who belongs to you, just because she is a female, or because his name is used in the possessive sense, such as Jana which in Polish is used like John's is used in English. Also, with the JASKOT \ JASKOTOW, the OW added simply means that she is from the JASKOT family.
One of the best and worst inventions to help genealogists, is the Soundex! It's wonderful if you are looking for names like SMITH and JONES. But try looking for MIERZEJEWSKI or DZIURA!! That's where I'm at!
The Soundex was based on the SOUNDS of the names. Great idea! It uses the sounds the letters create, when the name is spoken. So, SMITH, SMYTHE, SMITHE, and even SMOOTHE would all be coded the same. S530. So, if your family spells the name SMITH, and your great uncle's children by his second wife spell their name SMYTHE, you can find them with the Soundex.
Before we go into the problems of the Soundex, let me explain just a bit about it.
It's based, as I said, on the sounds letters make when they are spoken. So, right there, there is a problem. Most people who soundexed those wonderful things like the Census records and Ship Manifests were reading those names. And that makes a big difference.
The Soundex uses a letter and 3 digits to encode names. Here's the setup.
The first letter of the Surname is the letter used by the Soundex system to start your code. Then the other consonants in the name are assigned a number, according to their sounds. So, we have
- B P F V
- C S K G J Q X Z
- D T
- L
- M N
- R
Notice that the letters are grouped by SOUND. B and P are made in the same way, it just depends how much breath you use to make the sound. Say the letters out loud, you'll notice that P requires more breath than B. F and V are the same, F takes more breath moving through the lips.
C can sound like S or K, G and J have the same sound, but G can also sound like C or K, Q has a sound similar to C and K. X sounds like K and S together, and Z sounds like S, or S sounds like Z, as in the word “bees.”
There is no letter that sounds like L or R, so they each have their own code number.
M and N are so similar that they are almost interchangeable, and sometimes are interchanged by people writing our ancestors’ names.
There are only 3 digits used in a code, so if you have more than 3, you will be looking at names that don't seem to have any connection with the name you are looking for. And if you have less that 3 consonants, you have a name with zeros in it.
For instance, Robert E. Lee would look for his ancestors under the code L000. Jesse James would be found under the code J520.
Those are the basics. There are exceptions, and we are going to talk about them, too. Double letters, like the LL in the name WILLIAMS, are counted as a single letter. So you would code only one L, the M and the S, which would give you W452. Two letters used together to create one sound are also coded as just one letter. For instance the CK in the name BLACK. You would only code L and C, giving you B420. If you have names with TH, SH, CH or WH in them, you skip the H. The PH combination would of course be coded as F.
If you noticed, there are only 18 letters used in the coding formula. Vowels are not used, but what about the other 3 letters? Where are they? Well, H, W and Y are not included in the code, unless of course one of them is the first letter of the surname. But what if your name has an H or a W or a Y in it? How do you work that?
In some cases, like the name BROWN, you just skip the W and code only B R and N, giving you the Soundex code B650. How about a name like MAYS? The code for that would be M200. Then you have names with letters that don't sound like what they are. Those are the difficult ones.
For example:
My maternal grandmother's name was Anna BRONOWICKI. Now, remember, when you look at a name, you don't always know how that name sounds. BRONOWICKI would normally be coded, by someone who is reading it, with B652, for BRNC. That's because the name looks like it is pronounced BRON - O- WICK - EE. But, if the same person could hear my grandmother say her name, the code would be different! Her name is pronounced BRON - O- VIT -SKEE. The code then changes to B653. Because the W is pronounced like our V, the C is pronounced like TS. So, you don't skip the W in this case. And in the case of many names of ancestors who came from someplace other than the British Empire.
These changes affect not only the Soundex. They affect Birth, Marriage and Death documents, Naturalization papers, Census Records, Ship Manifests and other documents where our ancestors spoke their names to someone who then wrote down what they heard! So, in the census, my grandmother's family is listed as BRONOVITSKY, not a problem, it codes right! But, on her brother's Naturalization Papers, which he signed, his name is spelled BRONOWISKEY. Wonder what that guy was thinking of when he made those papers out!
And for all the years I have been looking for my grandmother's manifest, I could not find it anywhere. I even bought the microfilm of the Soundex to find her, with no luck. I found it on Ellis Island site just 2 weeks ago! I knew the ship name by then, and typed in Anna B* for the Baltic, between 1909 and 1911. BINGO!! There she was! Her name was spelled BRUNONVITSKY on the Ellis Island index, and BRANOWISKY on the manifest!
So, the whole point of this talk is, don't just go by the way your family spells your name. Check every Surname List you can find, and if you see a name that looks anything like yours, check it out. If your name is BROWN, and you see BRAUN, check it! BRAUN might have been the original spelling of the name. In my research for my grandfather, I have found at least 11 spellings of his last name. When I am doing any research and I find a name that is spelled anywhere close to any one of those spellings, I check it. One of them just might be a brother we never heard of!
My grandfather's name was MIERZEJEWSKI, he changed it to MIZEJEWSKI, and my father used MIZE in business. I was amazed when I moved to South Carolina and found the name MIZE everywhere! I mean there is a MIZE Road in every town around here, a body and fender shop, pastors of churches, a guy who makes four-wheelers, a gas station, a glass replacement shop, and a place that sells trailers! All named MIZE! It's killing me not to know where that name came from! But I’ll find out one of these days!
I have spoken with many people in chatrooms who are looking for a specific name, and I’ll tell them someone else is looking for a similar name, and they might want to contact that person. But they will say, “no, that's not the same as my name, we don't have an E in it.” I wonder how many people have missed a bingo by not looking at things just a bit differently.
If your ancestors came from another country, learn a little bit about the language, at least learn to pronounce your name the way they did in the old country. It might change the code for you or give you another code as an option. Because this is a country with such diverse cultures, we need to take them into consideration when we are doing our research. Our ancestors came here, and mostly stayed in areas where others from their own country had already settled.
As our great grandparents, and grandparents passed away, their children and grandchildren moved away from the old neighborhoods, because they were already assimilated into the American culture. They wanted live like the rest of the Americans, not like the Germans or the Russians or Poles. And so, names were changed to reflect a more American sound.
BREWER might once have been BRAUER, SMITH could once have been KOWALCZYK or SCHMIDT, and CARPENTER might once have been ZIMMERMAN. When our ancestors changed their names, it usually wasn't done in a courtroom, but maybe in the front office at their place of work, or in the schoolroom, where the teacher just couldn't pronounce the REAL name. Those changes stuck, and now we're stuck with the results. Find out what your present surname would mean in the home country of your ancestors, and you might just find the very first of your family to come to America, under a name you never heard!
Be aware too, that some countries have different alphabets than the one we use. We all know that Russia and Ukraine use the Cyrillic alphabet, which is quite a challenge. They have letters that look like some of ours, but maybe they are written backwards, like the letter that sounds like G but looks like a backwards small R. There is also a backwards 3. Scandinavian countries use the Latin or Roman alphabet, but they have some extra letters, like ae written together as one letter, or an o with little dots on top. Those letters have different sounds.
German and Polish, as well as other Slavic languages also have special letters, which change the pronunciation of a letter. Polish has an L with a diagonal line through it. It sounds like our W, but it is often mistaken for a T, because of that line through it. In German and Polish, W is pronounced like our V, in Russian and German, their V is pronounced F. If your ancestors come from a country with a slightly different alphabet, a good tip is to find out what your name would look like if it were written in that alphabet. It's much easier to recognize it when you are going through hundreds of documents from grandpa's hometown, but you don't see his name anywhere!
Another thing to remember, even though your grandpa spells his name JORGENSEN, like John's did, in Denmark it's pronounced YURGENSEN, and so we have to look under they Y codes as well as the J codes. In our Polish research, we were looking for ZAJAC, and found it under ZAYONTZ, because that's how it's pronounced.
Many of our ancestors could not read or write when they left home, so all they could do was speak their names. The person who heard the name, wrote them the way they sounded, and they were coded the way they were written. Which only adds to the confusion. Even though ZAJAC was coded as ZAYONTZ, I was looking for ZAJONTZ!! That makes a BIG difference! So be aware of those little problems and they won't become big problems.
I always tell folks to be creative with spelling. Think of every possible way your name can be spelled, and code for every variation you think of. Then ... think of the impossible ways to spell the name! You're bound to find it, one way or another! Genealogy is about the only place where spelling doesn't count, in fact, spelling things wrong is encouraged!
