WHAT'S IN A NAME?

Genealogists and family historians are nothing without names. Names are what we need. Without an all-important name, we cannot go back in time.

Newcomers might think that their family's current name has remained unchanged since surnames were adopted. That simply isn't the case and names have continually evolved for many reasons. Perhaps the most elemental is that spelling just wasn't as important back in the far past when most people were illiterate.

Surnames and their spellings been affected by ethnic naming practices and patterns, social class and immigration. Your name may be a simple variation, an Americanized or Anglicized version, or one that has been "invented," with no relation whatsoever to the original.

While some names have been traced for hundreds of years in a general geographic region, other quests require major sleuthing skills, along with detailed knowledge of specialized ethnic, social, cultural, religious and historical events.

There are many reasons why we can't find the names we know must be there … somewhere. The main reasons why these continue their game of hide and seek are due to misspelling, translations between languages, names not spelled as pronounced, changed (but not at Ellis Island - a major urban myth), etc.

This multi-part series of postings will address common problems and how to get around the obstacles.

SURNAME EVOLUTION

For most of civilization, surnames were simply not necessary.

China claims the first use of surnames in 2852 BC. In the 11th century, European surnames are recorded. As an example, Spanish Jews first began to use surnames in the 1100s, and in the 9th century in some cases, according to archival and notarial records. In most of Europe, however, Jews were not required to adopt surnames until the early 19th century.

As long as the world's population remained small and localized in villages, it was enough to know that in the village of Smalltown, David was the shoemaker, Simon the baker, Thomas the barrel-maker (cooper) and John the blacksmith. Since there was only one resident following each occupation, the townspeople required only the artisan's first name (given name). Everyone knew each man personally and where his business was located.

When the village began to grow, or villagers moved to larger towns or into cities, there may have appeared several shoemakers named David, bakers named Simon, coopers named Thomas, and smiths named John.

A single name wasn't sufficient. David decided to adopt his craft as his name: David Shoemaker. Simon found there were already several bakers with his name, so he decided to use his father's name as his surname - Simon Johnson (John's son). Thomas also took his craft as a name: Thomas Cooper, and the blacksmith became John Smith.

In the Middle Ages, family names are generally in four categories:

1. Patronymics are family names formed from a father's name ("son," son of) - a common device. Less common except in Scandinavia and Iceland are matryonymics formed from a mother's name ("dottir," daughter of). In the British Isles, some commonly used prefixes or suffixes are Mac (Gaelic), Fitz (Norman), O (Irish) and ap (Welsh).

2. Location, location, location: People were also identified by geographical features such as a river, forest, valley or a major building like a CHURCH or CASTLE. If a man lived in the western part of the forest, he may have been called WESTWOOD or FOREST. People also used their town of origin after moving to a larger population center, so those individuals we described above might just as easily have taken the name SMALLTOWN. This would be helpful when former neighbors visited and tried to locate the family.

3. Some omnastics (the study of names) scholars believe 10% of all names are based on physical characteristics or personality. Origins may be in medieval nicknames for body shape (tall and thin), hair (or not), beards, deformities (one eye, lame), hair color (red) or even character. A strong man might have been called ARMSTRONG, a short person was called SMALL.

4. Occupational names come from crafts or trades. MILLER ground flour, TAILOR made clothing. COOPER made barrels. In other countries, look for translations of such occupations: TAILOR is KHAYAT (Farsi) or SHNEIDER (Yiddish). MELNIK is miller (Russian).

Over the centuries, spelling and pronunciation changed, presenting contemporary genealogists with real challenges.

Different branches of a family may carry different names. Many contemporary English and American surnames have numerous variants. When researching a surname, remember to work back through the generations to determine the original name.

The next posting in this series will focus on names following immigration, the impact of accents on names and search techniques. Future postings will investigate naming patterns, origins, meanings and will provide links for additional research.

Readers are invited to post any questions or comments about names in general or specific names. I look forward to reading your comments.

WHY IS IT SO HARD?

Your family name has evolved since it was adopted. It may represent your family's sojourns in different countries, its spelling and pronunciation may have changed, and it may have been changed following a recent immigration.

Other factors, as mentioned in the previous article, are easy to understand. Spelling wasn't engraved in stone, people were illiterate or not literate in the common language of a specific area. Our ancestors didn't know how to spell their names and government officials were responsible for recording the names in registers or in important documents.

The official wrote the name the way he heard it. Perhaps the official was elderly and deaf in one ear, or your ancestor had a speech impediment or an accent. When your ancestor's cousin came in to record a later birth, however, a new younger official sat behind the desk, one whose hearing was excellent and the cousin spoke clearly.

When immigrants moved to a new country, they often changed their names. They wanted to make it easier for themselves, their neighbors and employers to spell or pronounce their names, and for official documents. If the original names were written in other alphabets - such as Cyrillic (Russian, Bulgarian etc.) - they were phonetically transliterated into English, providing many new spelling possibilities. Accents or dialects further complicated the choices.

When specific letters or combinations of letters in an original language could not be understood properly in a new language, the immigrant tried to simplify it, but variations can be traced to those with difficult-to-understand accents and imperfect knowledge of English, in the case of U.S. immigrants. Thus, a name was pronounced one way and recorded another way. In fact, a search of a family through utilizing city directories might show how the immigrant kept changing his or her name. My great-grandfather, whose original name was TALALAY, used TOLINE in his petition for citizenship (and it explained why it took me years to find it!), changed to TOLIN and finally to TOLLIN, while his brother adopted TALLIN.

Immigrants sometimes felt that if they translated their name, it would be simpler. It might have been as easy as simply translating the old name into the new language. In Israel, a family named Mandelbaum (almond tree) in Europe may have selected Shaked (almond in Hebrew). Some immigrants wanted a complete break from their former lives, or they may have been escaping from conscription in the old country and still afraid of officials who might come looking for them - this alone was enough reason to adopt a new name.

At some periods in certain countries, people of certain ethnicities were forced to adopt surnames imposed on them. When able, they'd drop the new names and return to the original or a "better" one in their subjective opinion. Others wanted to avoid persecution and, to hide their nationality or religion, adopted less-ethnic names. At certain times in Europe, for example, Jewish marriages were not recognized by the civil authorities (although couples had religious marriages). Thus registrars recorded the children's family name as the mother's maiden name. Upon immigration, the person began to use his father's name.

WHAT TECHNIQUES HELP?

Searching for variations and permutations and eventually locating the original name takes time, sometimes lots of time. Here are some tips:

Don't just read the name silently, speak it and try to spell it phonetically. Ask others to speak the name. Try this experiment: ask a young child to write the name as you say it. Their phonetic interpretation may be helpful.

Try to translate the name back to its original language using an online translation site, like Babelfish or dictionaries. If possible, check surrounding countries or in the case of Eastern Europe and its changing borders, see what the name is in the various languages used in one geographical location.

Vowels and initial letters. Names beginning with H or a vowel need attention. Depending on the language, the H may be dropped or added, and a name that begins with one vowel may begin with any of them; A/O or I/E are the common vowel substitutes. Check all possible variations.

Be careful with Eastern European-origin names beginning with J - this could also be transliterated as I, E or Y; a final E, S or Z may have been dropped or added; there may be one or two Ns at the end or one or two Ms in the middle.

When working with indexes, human error may be the culprit. Transcribers suffer from eye strain, put their fingers on the wrong keys, even write in the wrong column. I've seen records where the field was "Marital Status" and the answer was "Russian" - an obvious error. A transcriber might transpose certain letters. Try to see the possibilities by writing down the name. Under it, write various transpositions of all the letters, including the first one. Other errors are easily understood by looking at your keyboard, where nearby letters are confused when fingers are placed on the wrong keys.

When thinking about alternative spellings, try prefixes, suffixes and different endings.

When you search online, always choose "sounds like" or "alternative spellings" or "Soundex" to increase the returns and possible success. When using MyHeritage's powerful search engine which searches 1,200+ genealogy databases with one click, you'll see many alternate names from which to choose.

Another remarkable program devised by Edward Rosenbaum and called Name Permutations, will list hundreds upon hundreds of name variants, categorized bythe number of changed letters, from 1 to 6 or more, including first letter variables. It provides variations that will not be picked up by other search engines. It is shareware and has a nominal cost.

If you are dealing with immigrants to America, however, please do not believe that your ancestor's name was changed at Ellis Island. Nearly every genealogy conference offers a lecturer addressing this great urban myth. No cases have been found where an immigrant's name was changed by an official at Ellis Island. The person may have adopted a new name the minute he or she walked out the door, but it wasn't changed by an official on Ellis Island.

Passenger manifests were prepared in Europe by staff who understood many languages, and these manifests were used to merely check off the passenger as he or she went through Ellis Island, and inspectors, often foreign-born themselves, were assisted by translators who spoke 60 languages and dialects.

In 1898, one of my family's first immigrants arrived, changed his name from TALALAY to TOLLIN, and wrote home about it. Those who followed also adopted the new name almost immediately. Another story told in many family branches was that the immigrant was told by a fellow traveler - who spoke some English - on the ship, that the new immigrant would have to change his name immediately as no one would give a job to Mr. Tell-a-lie. Every immigrant ancestor told this story to his and her children and grandchildren. We believe it happened to Mendel in 1898, he wrote home and everyone knew the story. Most TALALAY adopted TOLLIN or TALLIN, although there are some other variations.

The next posting will focus on international naming patterns.

Do you have a story about a name change in your family? Readers are invited to share stories, questions and comments. I look forward to reading your comments right here.

If you are searching for names from particular ethnic, religious, cultural and social communities, do some investigative reading. The clues in articles and on websites may provide more information for your quest.

Here are some quick tips for various groups. There are many other useful sites to be found with some patient Internet searching.

Readers are invited to let us know about other useful sites. I look forward to reading your comments and questions.

ARABIC
Excellent article on the permutations, categories and much more.

CHINESE
Good article on given name patterns and surnames.

FINNISH
Unusual patterns, farms, homesteads, patronymics and matronymics.

GERMAN
Detailed name categories: occupations, locations, physical characteristics, saints, objects, regional diminutive, suffixes.

IRISH ANCIENT
Interesting site detailing ancient names and meanings, and naming patterns for children.

JEWISHGEN, for many resources on Jewish names.
Check the numerous InfoFiles, Family Finder and other resources.

LATIN AMERICAN
A good explanation of confusing naming patterns concerning the usage order of paternal and maternal family names, given names and more.

NORWEGIAN
ncludes first names, farm names, Sami ethnic minority, immigrants and more sources.

POLAND
A good compilation ofPolish naming customs including German, Jewish and Ukrainian.

SCANDINAVIAN
Traditions and information on Norway, Denmark and Finland, with more resources.

SWEDEN
Early naming practices, such as patronymic, clergy, nobility, crafts, emigrants and more.

VIETNAM
Vietnamese naming practices.

For a host of other interesting articles, click here :

ASIA (Mongolia, India)
BYZANTIUM (Roman Empire)
EASTERN EUROPE (Croatian, Czech, Hungarian)
ENGLAND (many articles)
FRANCE (Paris, Breton, Brittany, Occupations, Given Names)
GERMANY (many),
ISLAM/MIDDLE EAST (place names in Spain and Portugal, Jewish, Andalucia)
IRELAND (several)
ITALY (Pisa, Renaissance, Jewish Rome, Jewish Milan)
LOW COUNTRIES (Flemish, Frisian, women)
ROMAN
RUSSIA
SCANDINAVIA (language, Finland, ancient)
SCOTLAND (several)
SPAIN/IBERIA (Andalusia, Catalan, Valencia, 15th-16th century, Portugese, Moorish place names)
WALES (10th, 13th, 16th centuries, women, Cornish).

The Internet is an amazing place, continually collecting information from people around the world.

The sheer amount of information can be overwhelming, as we discover family pages, cemetery data, photographs, family trees and more documents.

If you consider yourself a good online researcher, you can go directly to Yahoo or Google or other general sites. However, the mass of information returned can be impossible to get through, much could be irrelevant to your genealogical quest, but you might turn up an undiscovered gem or two.

Who among us hasn't Googled themselves and watched in wonder as our lives seemingly scroll down the page? There is so much in cyberspace, but how do we find relevant data?

As discussed in the past few articles, spelling is a major problem. For some people, the trouble is very basic - they can't even spell "genealogy." To see how many people are in the same boat, search for geneology, geniology, geneaoplogy, geneologie, genlogy or other even more creative forms on the major search engines and note how many times the error pops up in various websites.

Search engines are what we work with, with specific techniques and tips to access the desired data. If you organize a good search, you'll limit the junk, and focus on useful information.

SEARCH ENGINES

There are general search engines and indexes, genealogy search engines and indexes, and specific ethnic resources.

General Search Engines and Indexes

These include Yahoo, Google, About.com and others, online encyclopedias, library sites, newsgroups and message boards to name a few. It doesn't hurt to search each one, but be prepared for much irrelevant information.

Genealogy Search Engines and Indexes

These include the massive compilation of sites at Cyndi's List, and other sites like Distant Cousin, Genealogy Pages, GeneaLinks, Genealogy Home Page, Gengateway.com, Genealogy Search, and Genealogy Portal, About.com's focused genealogy pages. These sites offer links to other listings of links and resources. While these are free, don't forget Ancestry.com which is a subscription for-fee website with masses of databases, links, resources.

Additionally there is the Ellis Island Database, and also Steve Morse's One-Step Pages for navigating, many US and Canadian sites, and many ethnic-specific resources including Jewish, British, European, Eastern European and those farther afield.

For Jewish resources, there are a host of sites, beginning with JewishGen www.jewishgen.org, and continuing with Jewish Records Indexing-Poland, Jewish Webindex, Cindy's List - Jewish, Harry Leichter's Jewish Genealogy list, Judaism 101 - Hebrew Alphabet, JewishLink.net
Jewish Calendar, Jewish Migration Histories Timeline, Sephardic resources, Holocaust research, Avotaynu's Consolidated Surname Index, and many others.

And as good as all of these are for a variety of reasons, you'll have to search each one individually, which can be tedious, for hundreds of searches for each family of interest on as many websites as you can find.

MyHeritage's Megadex

Wouldn't it be great to search, at once, hundreds of genealogically relevant websites? MyHeritage thought so, and now you can search for all the names and their variations in some 1,200 genealogy-specific databases, with only one simple click at MyHeritage Research - a focused genealogy search engine.

For each search, click on up to 10 spelling variants at a time, save searches to avoid backtracking or duplication, and schedule automatic searches to alert you to new data.

It queries Websites, databases, archives and message boards; covering all gtypes of genealogy records including census records, family trees, immigration records, military records, medical records, cemetery records, court, land and probate documents, and other informational sources, such as newspapers, telephone directories, and more.

And because MyHeritage has a team of dedicated genealogists, they are always looking for new sources to include, and which automatic searches will pick up. For the current list of databases, click here.

Click here to start learning about MyHeritage's super search engine Megadex™ which will help you find richer information about your ancestors.

For example, if you are searching for Williamson, you'll also need to search for Williemson, Williamsen and Williamsohn, because names have evolved and the names are written differently in various languages and countries. Other errors or variants in spelling may be due to hard-to-read handwriting, transcription, transliteration and typing.

Soundex is a phonetic system that's been around since 1918 and assigns numbers to letters, enabling a "sounds alike" method, but not all databases work with Soundex. Conducting a Soundex search means you will retrieve many false positives which are irrelevant. And it may not pick up Villiamson or Wilhelmson, which would be relvant.

Megadex was invented by MyHeritage to overcome these challenges. It shows you the most common spelling variations, and allows searching for a subset of variations in a single, one click search that covers most major genealogy databases on the Internet (as well as those which do not support "sounds like").

Go to the search screen, type in a name:

When you click, you'll get a screen with multiple choices. Check off the ones you want to search first (up to 10 at a time):

As the search is performed, the results for each database will show up, and you can select which ones to look at. You receive a long table of results, and can start working immediately on them without waiting for the entire table to load.

There are two very convenient features: You can save each search, which helps eliminate duplication or back tracking of work already done and you can also schedule automatic searches to find new results, as databases are updated frequently.

Why don't you try a search now? How many hits did you get? Were they useful? Readers are invited to write in and comment on their experiences with Megadex. Let me know if you've encountered any problems.

There are many ways to let people know you are searching for a specific family: Submit information to specialized ethnic or geographic genealogy sites, join discussion groups or send letters to everyone you find with your name.

The Southern California Genealogical Society (Burbank, California) has a good idea.

The SCGS has just launched a free Virtual Surname Wall that anyone can inscribe with their unique names and origins.

It's simple (and free) to write your names on the Wall, and more than 1,000 people from around the world have already joined in. To see if any of your surnames of interest are listed, click on the link "Search the Virtual Surname Wall," at the SCGS homepage.

Once you're there, search by surname, location, Submitter ID or any combination of these parameters.

Features: The site is a "begins with" search, which means that if you search for the last name TAL, you'll also get TALALAY, TALL, TALMADGE, etc.. There are also good search tips.

To enter your names, click on the link "Add Your Surnames." For each name submit the following information:

1. Surnames including spelling variations
2. Geographic area where they lived or the migration path, indicated like this example, Paris -> New York. SCGS asks that geographic information be listed in this order: city, county, state and country. Abbreviations such as two-letter codes for US states should NOT be used to avoid confusion.
3. For time frame, DO use abbreviations (such as approx., abt., or ca.) to indicate approximate timelines.

Visitors may submit as many names as they desire. Each entry screen accepts up to 10 names, but visitors can enter multiple screens. If a message appears saying "the survey has already been completed," just click "take the survey again" and continue adding names.

The Wall is not limited to just California; researchers from around the world are encouraged to submit their names of interest.

I am also impressed by the privacy options offered. Submitters' contact details are not displayed online, and submitters have the options to allow the SCGS to release only an email contact, or full details, or to have SCGS serve as the intermediary in the event they receive an inquiry regarding a possible connection. This is a reassuring way to deal with differing comfort levels.

Participation is voluntary and free and the society asks submitters to let their colleagues, friends and family know that they can also write on the Wall.

As entries are added to the database, the Virtual Surname Wall will become a more valuable resource. And with the publicity this innovation is garnering, check back often to see if you find a match.

Some statistics prove it is catching on: On Friday, January 18, there were some 1,500 visitors and about 5,000 page loads. However, as the genealogy world learned about the Wall - thanks to the genealogy bloggers, the following Monday saw nearly 6,000 visitors and almost 21,000 page loads.

There's also a handy widget that shows where visitors live. Go to the site, scroll to the bottom right hand corner for a world map showing red dots, which represent visitors to the site since January 9; click for a larger version.

Readers in California and neighboring states might be interested in the SCGS Jamboree, set for June 27-29. This excellent regional conference grows every year; some 30 experts will speak this year. Last year, about 1,200 researchers attended; more are anticipated this year. To learn more, go to the SCGS homepage; click on the Jamboree link to learn more about the program, the speakers and for registration details. SCGS has also launched a Jamboree conference blog; for more information.

Good luck in your quest. I look forward to reading your questions and comments.