This is an example of difficult research

+14 votes
383 views
Just wanted everyone to know that research can be made even more difficult because of poor handwriting, and poor transcription of the handwriting.   

Take a look at this poor man's name over the years....
WikiTree profile: Garrett Darland
in Genealogy Help by Robin Lee G2G6 Pilot (852k points)

Robin, THANX for posting this - misery loves company!  I'm so glad to see I'm not the only one hitting my head against the wall.  I think I can see your Darland and raise it one Livesay.

lol, welcome to the club, census takers are notorious for making strange mistakes, having to find people in 1666 and 1667 censuses in New France is often an exercise in creative imagination to figure out what name got used.  Good job on figuring him out.
I may be able to shed some light on the missing birth records, and add to the surname confusion.

TL;dr: This person may have originally been a Dyrland.

My adoptive maiden name is Dyrland, a norwegian name. When it is pronounced in Norwegian, it sounds an awful lot like Durland. Many of my great grandparents families emigrated to the midwestern states in the Norwegian immigration boom of the 1800s. The Dyrland name splintered into those who kept it as Dyrland (a lot of the Dakotas and Canadian branches of the family).. Others accepted the anglicized version as Durland.

Dyrland is a county in the Telemark region of western Norway (where skiing was invented). As was the custom in the 1800s, emigrating Norwegians took the name of the farm or region they were from if they needed to differentiate from other branches of the family who had common names or descendants (e.g. my grandfather was a Pederson, literally Peter's Son, and he had 14 siblings).

The surname also gets misspelled often as Dryland, or as Durland or even Darland, because the Y-R consonant grouping look wrong *hence R-Y) or sounds wrong (Hence U-R) to American-English and Canadian-English eyes.

Until I started filling in profiles for the surname Dyrland here on Wiki tree this week, there were only four with the name on our tree, when there are about 1000 of them in the world. I'm working on it.

My suggestion would be to see if you can situate this person as a Dyrland or a Dryland and see if he can be linked back to Norway. On a quick search, I did see an emigration passenger list for him coming into Boston, so it is possible he wasn't born in the US, but rather came from Norway.
Thanks for your insight, but, this is a well documented family,  Dorlandt,  Dutch by origin and about 4th generation born in Kentucky.

3 Answers

+9 votes
 
Best answer
Oh, now that’s a mess! Nicely done profile, by the way.
by Pip Sheppard G2G Astronaut (2.7m points)
selected by Rubén Hernández
Thanks, Rubén!
+10 votes
clearly looks like "Garrett" to me in the 1900 census, not "George". Bad transcription.
by Dennis Wheeler G2G6 Pilot (569k points)
this is why is good to look at the actual document (image), and not blindly follow the transcription
+6 votes
Nicely done. Nice profile. I understand your pain...my grandmother was a similar journey, since I found 12 spellings for her given name and 12 variants for her maiden name.
by Kay Knight G2G6 Pilot (593k points)

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