This is a response to a question that was submitted last week and a reply
made to that question. The original question was
Cactus Flower schrieb:
...
> Might the spelling of a surname in written records depend upon the
person
> creating the record?
Hans Peter Albers replied:
In normal case not. In an almost closed community with same language,
people know
not only how to speak, but also how to hear. The number of this changes in
writing increase as you go back in history, because of the literarity came
only
slowly from the hands of few to a common daily instrument. But when the
names
were regularly written down their shape became fix and more fix. Another
case is
always, when a change of living into a region with different language
takes
place. Accustomated to other translations of the heard into the written
for the
same heard there are different results in writing. The problem increases
with the
strangeness of two languages.
I normally agree with Hans Peter Albers, but this time I disagree. I have
frequently seen the spelling of names change because of how the name was
recorded in the church record books. One priest or pastor spelled the name
one way and he was followed by another priest or pastor who spelled the name
in a different way. I will agree that this occurs less and less as one
approaches the present. But it still happens.
I have three cases that I would like to mention. The first case occurred in
my mother's Hansult family. The earliest records I have for this family
Grebenau in Hesse-Darmstadt, all written by the same pastor over a 23 year
time span (1729-1752), give five different spellings of the name: Hansoult,
Hansult, Handsold, Hansul, and Handsoult. When my ancestor moved from
Grebenau to Wisselsheim, located about 45 miles (72 km) away, his name was
recorded as Hansold in the new parish for about 50 years, then was changed
to Hansult. This change was actually made by my ancestor's son, also an
ancestor, who was the schoolmaster in Wisselsheim and thus hopefully more
educated than most of the other people in the village. One of my ancestor's
tasks as schoolmaster was to witness the death records for the village. He
signed these records for about 18 years. In the first nine years he signed
his name "Hansold" and the last nine years he signed it "Hansult". I don't
know the reason he made the the change -- possibly he learned that his
relatives back in his father's birth village used the spelling Hansult or
perhaps he changed the name to more closely represent the name's original
meaning, which according to family legend is "hand of salt". (Aside: One
branch of this family from the original parish experienced a further name
change when the name was recorded as "Hansuld" when they emigrated from
Grebenau to Canada in the 1840's. This branch has now spread throughout
Canada and the U.S.)
The second case concerns my Schmirmund ancestors and another branch of the
same family that lived in the same village for many years, the Smirmund
family. My earliest Schmirmund family came to the village of Steinfurth in
Hesse-Darmstadt in about 1650 from the village of Ober-Seybertenrod, also in
H-D, about 25 miles (40 km) northeast of Steinfurth. People with that name
lived in Steinfurth at least until the early 1900's with their name changing
slightly to Schmiermund by a pastor who recorded the records in the
early-to-mid 1800's. The more significant spelling difference was that used
by two previous pastors in the village, a father and son named Smirmund, who
were from a branch of the same family in Ober-Seybertenrod and who served as
pastors at Steinfurth for a total of 64 years (1753-1817). For some reason,
the pastors used the name Smirmund for themselves and their immediate family
and they used the name Schmirmund for their cousins. (Aside: The family in
and near Ober-Seybertenrod continues to use the name Schmirmund. At some
point, the name was even exported to Hungary. Another branch of the same
family that moved to Grebenau, about 20 miles east-northeast of
Ober-Seybertenrod had their name changed to Schmermund in the records.
Today, one can find genealogical references to Schmirmund, Schmiermund and
Schmermund in U.S. records, but not many for Smirmund.)
The last case concerns my Oerding ancestors from the parishes of Selsingen
and Bargstedt in Hannover, now Niedersachsen. In early records in the
1700's in the parish of Selsingen, this name was written as Oerding, �rding,
Ording, and even Oedding. However, when my ancestor Andreas Oerding married
in the parish of Bargstedt in 1804, his last name was recorded as "Ernst".
The family continued to be called "Ernst" in the records until the 1850's.
In some records, the name was recorded as just "Ernst", in some as "Ernst,
auch Oerding" and in some as "Oerding, auch Ernst". The name "Ernst" was
also used in the parish of Mulsum when someone from another branch of the
Oerding family in Selsingen married in that parish. The best explanation I
have for this was suggested by a researcher from Germany who said that the
local people frequently used a nickname for a family, perhaps something like
"Oerds", and that the pastor in the other parishes heard this name and
thought it was "Ernst". (Aside: In the U.S., different branches of the
Oerding family spelled the name Oerding and Ording.)
I find it interesting that all of these name changes were made by the
supposedly more educated pastors and/or schoolmasters of the village. In
almost all cases, the spelling reverted back to an original or fairly close
spelling, perhaps reflecting the ultimate dominance of the way most people
pronounced the name, as suggested by Hans Peter Albers. There have been
many cases, however, of slight name variations as suggested by my "Asides"
for all three cases. One should be "open" to these possible spelling
variations.
Fred Buck
Cincinnati, Ohio
(My last name is also spelled Buk, Bok and Bock in various records from in
or around Lamstedt in Hannover/Niedersachsen.)