There is another fun aspect of searching for your ancestors in
historical records: the misspelling of his or her name. Before
the advent of electronic census processing, before the advent of
the automobile, census takers of old had to do their job on
horseback or on foot. They had to take the census details of
every household within the county or counties they were
responsible for. I can only imagine they had deadlines to meet
as part of the process. So I don’t entirely blame them for
mistakes made with names. However, Mistakes were made and it is
one of the fundamental challenges for people tracing their
ancestry using historical documents like census returns, tax
lists, marriage records and death records. It would appear, from
what I’ve seen, that names are spelt phonetically. I would also
hazard a guess that the ethnic origins of the census taker
influenced the phonetic spelling of names. There is then the
matter of the regional accent of the person providing his or her
details to the census taker. So all