Which name is most commonly used in pay programs?

Question

I have sourced one unsourced generation of Guittres and added Gittere as another name.  I started on the next generation and checked the next generation up and they seem to be sourced.  There are more than thirty profiles in three generations with Guittre and only two with Gittere.  My problem is that all of the census records and the death records, and business records are spelled Gittere.  Are there any birth records on any of the pay programs that have birth records that spell the name Guittre?  I would like to drop the Guittre and only use Gittere on the profiles, no other name.
Any advice would be appreciated.

Comments

A thought …

Pronouniation of these two names is very different. In Guittre the g is a “hard g” as in the English “go.” In Gittre, it is a “soft g”, think of the name “Georges” which sounds like it might begin with “zh.” So, I think these would have been, or should have been, written differently by an English speaker.

However, with the orthographic creativity of the census takers, anything is possible!

I concur with Day.

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Ancestry has immigration and naturalization records GUITTRE for several US states

Marriage records Pennsylvania and Michigan

US census and several US high school yearbooks and US city directories

Answer 1

I can't find any on Ancestry, but then I could be searching wrong - never searched outside England on there.

On that note, it's hard to say, given that there doesn't seem to be any source for the birth records in the profiles either.

My guess is that Guittre was the original french spelling, but it was changed to Gittere when they moved to the states. So if the decision was mine to make, I would leave the French born as Guittre and change the US born to Gittere.

Answer 2

I did a search in the birth, marriage, and death category for surname = Guittre (exact match only) at the US Library edition of Ancestry. There were only 74 results. The majority of these were French death records. There were a few US records, mostly obituaries, a few marriages, some find-a-grave, and at least one German record.

Comments

Update …

I did a search at the French website Filae.com (non-member search, so of limited utility) for GUITTRE (simple search surname only) and got 634 hits which were divided between Guittre and Guittré.

A search for Gittere (no accents) gave 54 hits.Of these a few were Gitteré.

Answer 3

You wouldn't want to obscure important information in the name of uniformity. Here is the birth record for his father that uses "Guittre".

https://www.familysearch.org/photos/artifacts/98249346

As you mentioned, the family does seem to be well-sourced, but here is a page from FamilySearch showing what French records are available and where:

https://www.familysearch.org/wiki/en/France_Online_Genealogy_Records

Answer 4

To help your cousins find the profile, record all of the spellings that the person used (or may have used) somewhere in the data fields.