Name Variants

 Name variants in genealogy and family history research are a headache.  It means that you have to search for each of the variant spellings of a surname in every resource.  It takes time.  

At WikiTree, the preference, and expectation, is that there is one correct surname, but that just isn't true, and, in practice, what's used is the "last name at birth".  Unhappily, even that is often inaccurate.  Many of my ancestors were illiterate, rural people who neither read, nor wrote.  Reading and writing were not taught to many people for generations.  In addition, official records of births, marriages and deaths didn't begin until about 1881 and, even then, not everyone complied with registration.  Many babies were born at home.  Common law marriage was common.  People died at home and were buried on their own land.  The names written in documents were not written by the person themselves but by others who wrote what they heard and often the name is written differently within the same document.

Spelling had no "rules" until the mid-1800s and, again, even then, spelling rules evolved and "improved".  So, it's no wonder that names can have many variant spellings.

Add to that the mass of immigrants with languages in different scripts, like German, and variants are multiplied.  The history of any language can be very complex and confusing.  My given name, Lorraine, is a very modern spelling and is, apparently, derived from Lothairingen or Lothair.  Now tell me how Lothair became Lorraine.

Many variant spellings are just that, differences of one or two letters because spelling was inexact for generations:  Wormuth, Wormouth.  Individuals who wrote also had preferences that might differ from those of relatives.  My birth surname, O'Dell, alternates within my own family between Odell and O'Dell.  My mother's birth surname, Beismer, is a very modern spelling that has only existed for a few generations and that family line has as many as 52 reported variant spellings, some of them still in use.

So, just a few thoughts about the annoyance of surname variant spellings.  We keep finding new ones for Wormuth.