Are you thinking outside the box when it comes to names?

It’s kinda like a game and you need to be creative with spelling to find those long lost ancestors sometimes.

Although I had been researching my family history for many years before I moved to Melbourne and scored my first job in a pizza shop. It helped me understand why we need to be creative. Because different people hear things differently and some time their misunderstandings of English makes you want to cackle in your collar.

One night I saw a delivery for a local bar and the exact words where ‘Lamb in the Barn’ heck where was that? When it should have been Labor in the Vain! Some words over the years really had me thinking, really? Why didn’t I come up with that.

Being creative with the cd’s or databases are vital as typos are common and some are purely mistakes and others are not able to translate the original handwriting.

I do recall some indexes where being done by prisoners so I do hope it was done correctly if this was true.

When I was in New Zealand I was fortune to find my German ancestor only because it was pointed out to me that my ‘Schmidt’ was indexed under ‘Smith!’ What a creative choice that was? It really was long shot.

Another reason to be creative is because of the strong ascents our ancestors had that made simple words like McCaffrey become McCaftery along with other names too.

Therefore mixing words and changing letters was really one could do in the early days.

Some of the examples are:

·      Wm for William

·      Jn for John

·      Smith instead of Schmidt

·      Haughton, Howton instead of Houghton

·      Poole, Pauly instead of Pawley

·      Garriock, Garrioch instead of Garrick