Could we add a ASA section to account for spelling changes through time in the sources?

Question

The AKA's of international travelers in the middle ages should also have their names in Latin French English . There are also spelling changes between Lang d'oc and Oil based languages in the s Aquitaine and France. Celtic, Old English and Norse spellings can also be looked at.

Once we have all the AKA's merging is easy.

Comments

Isn't that what the "Other Last Names" is for?

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You might want to change the title to ...add an AKA section.... if you want more people to respond.

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I'm discovering that there's a substantial amount of "name-drift" among my relatives.  Whether due to spelling mistakes by census-takers or other officials writing a record, spelling mistakes by later indexers of that record, or intentional changes by ancestors in order to 'American-ize' or simplify their own names.

When I add a person, if I use the novel spelling as it appears in a record, I'm inadvertently creating an entire lineage on WT!  (For instance, my gg-grandfather Louis is Greutegain-1, yet his descendants are Grautegen-1, Grautegen-2, etc.)

I'd like to know how other WTers are handling name-drift when they add a new profile....

 

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Ideally, you should be using the Last Name at Birth as found in a birth record or other records around the time of the birth.

I don't let it bother me that 10 generations ago my grandmother's surname was Crowfoot, then changed to Crofut about generation five and then Crofutt two generations before her. I just use what they would have used.

Answer 1

If there's a major story to how the name evolved through the years as well as its different versions in different languages at different times, you might write it all up in a free space profile and then link it to each of the person-profiles affected.