Poor Spellers Welcome

Spell-check will fix that by Eli Christman is licensed under a 

Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic (CC BY 2.0).  

No alterations to image - www.flickr.com

I don't know about you, but in school I was always the first one out of the spelling bee.  While other kids in my class thought spelling bees were great and thought of them as a fun game, I would dread them and break out in a sweat the moment I heard our teacher say we were going to have one.

Although my spelling has improved a bit over the years, it is still not one of my better skills.  Luckily for me, being a poor speller can actually work to my advantage when it comes to genealogy.  Why is that you ask?  Well, because like me, and maybe you too, there are a whole lot of other bad spellers in the world.  Yes, that's right, we are not alone.

So, as we search for our ancestors by name, remember to search what you think is the correct spelling, but also search for common misspellings of that same name.  The worse your spelling, the easier it will be for you to come up with these alternatives.  Some websites automatically build this in with "exact" or "sounds like" search options, but for others you will need to remember to enter all variations (for example, when you are using a search engine like Google).

Another thing to consider:  don't immediately disregard someone as not being your ancestor just because there is an extra 'e' in the name or the 'h' is missing.  Right now, I'm researching an ancestor with the surname (as I know it) of Terrian.  So far, I have found my ancestor in documents listed as Terrian, Terrien, Therrien, Terren, and even on their grave stone as Teerian.  I'm working with a possible cousin in Canada to track down documents there which may have listed one of my ancestors in this line as L'Italien.  So, as you can see, spelling is not always a good indicator of whether the person listed in the document is indeed your ancestor or not.  This can only be determined by analysing all the claims noted in the document and comparing them to what you know about your ancestor.

So, keep on researching and keep on spellin bd.  ;)