Will - there are no
misspelled names - just phonetic guesses by recorders. Many beginning genealogists make the mistake of disregarding information because a name isn't spelled the 'right way'. If your great great grandfather couldn't read or write, he couldn't tell someone how the name should be spelled. Spelling also wasn't uniform - it was no big deal how things were spelled. Early dictionaries were more concerned with defining the meaning of a word, rather than the spelling or pronunciation.
I always told my students to throw spelling out the window and get creative. Not only do you have to worry about the spelling - but how did the transcriber see the word.
For example I have an ancestor whose name was Raymond Fortin. The same person transcribed the county's records and He shows up as Barns or Bams Fortin. When I actually saw the original I could see why. Although we're dealing with IL, the family was of French Canadian ancestry so spoke French. It is obvious that he pronounced the name Ramo and the recorder wrote it that way. However, to the 20th century transcriber, the R looked like a B, the o an s.
So early misspellings of names will also give you a clue to the accent of your ancestor. My mother's maiden name Rakestraw (pronounced just as it is spelled, rake straw) is recorded as Rexstree in some early records. One family today uses the spelling Rickstrew.
Favorite Sites
I like
www.genforum.com Sometimes you can really hit the jackpot there. If not - you can get access to others researching the same people.
It gets alot of complaints but
www.familysearch.com the LDS site is one of the few places you can still download gedcoms to help you avoid retyping alot of information. Keep two files - one proved and the other your "roadmap" or families to look at closer to prove.
The LDS church has recently revamped the program, hoping to have people update and correct the incorrect information. You can do that using the genealogy program Ancestral Quest. They still offer PAF as a free download.
Many use
www.ancestry.com but it has a fee unless you use their intro offer - make sure you unsub (has to be by phone). One word of caution. Beware of their "One Family Tree" pedigree site. In my opinion it can be worse than the LDS site. What they did was throw all of our pedigrees into a computer and let the computer decide which family belonged where. The LDS site is full of human error. This is computer error. I found it because people kept emailing me for sources for things I had never put into a file. Not to mention I had removed all family files a few years before in protest of ancestry taking over rootsweb.
When I looked at the problem their computer had added incorrect information to an older file of mine and was still listing me as the source of information. I emailed them to complain and point out the problem. All you can do is use those post-its they have to warn people. But unless you LOOK at your files you think you know what you have in them.
Which brings us to
incorrect information. I recently wrote a book for a family organization. One of the older members was upset that I chose to use known incorrect sources. His feeling was that we should have distanced ourselves from it. My point of view is that if I had ignored the incorrect sources, some newbie would have thought they had uncovered some new information we didn't have and use it as the latest and greatest. By including the incorrect sources we could address that so and so said such and such but it is wrong.
But why are these old genealogies wrong? The science of History as we know it has only been in existence since the early 20th century. Prior to that accuracy wasn't as important in a history book as a good read. History was romanticized. So was our family history. People didn't have the opportunity to travel and do "in person" research. They relied on the family lore of others. Embarassing bits? Downplay them or rewrite. Similar last names must be the same family. So old family histories aren't always accurate.
Mary Ann