Should I correct my ancestor name so it shows in searches because I believe other researchers are unable to find it

Question

This name difference continues to jam me up especially trying to link with other sites sources dna matches and trees across the whole web. i am certain there are other researchers that do not know the amount of details needed to find her subsequently that have been hitting this brick wall.  I have a dna link to her and i am trying to make a connection. I have a great deal of source information with consistent differences in spelling but the name of record for wiki is not in any of them.

Answer 1

What spellings are you referring to?

As the profile is full of supposition and differing sources it would pay to tread carefully .

Answer 2

And to throw more fuel on the fire. ;)

Marion is correct as you have many sources with many spellings. One major point is to not trust the Transcriptions, look at the images where available.

Case in point: Source #15 on her Profile

15. Caroline Lafare in entry for William Bargeron and Rose Larange, "Michigan Marriages, 1868-1925". "Michigan Marriages, 1868-1925", database with images, FamilySearch (https://familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:N3JN-1QM), Caroline Lafare in entry for William Bargeron and Rose Larange, 1906.

The Transcription lists her as Caroline Lafare.  When you look at the image the spelling appears to Caroline Lafan.  Look at the spellings of other names on the image and you can see that is not how the recorder would write "re" as the last letter(s) of her name.  Their "e" and "r" are as distinct as their 'n". 

When ever I get a name with more than a few spellings or just a possible misspelling, I always check the image if one is available.  I had one where the transcription of a US Census listed the name as Dorm Laverue.  Checking the image I could see it was both a Spelling Error and Recording Error as the persons's name is actually David Lawrence.  LOL  The parents names, entered correctly on the form, were at the bottom of one page and the children were at the top of the next.  Somehow the name changes from Lawrence to Levarue on the next page and all of the children's names were mangled in a like manner.

The image of a document is the evidence, not the transcription. 

Comments

I would also say that for names written by clerks and enumerators from oral communication, the profile manager may need to know the family or find something like a signed document to determine what the correct spelling of a name really is.  I have three sets of Irish ancestors that had their surnames misspelled constantly throughout the 19th century in North America: Prendergast, Killoran and McDonnell.  Only by 1900 did spelling seem to be communicated to official record keepers.

Don't always believe what you see in records when it comes to spelling, and this can produce major errors in family trees if the ancestors didn't write anything down.  I have seen at least one Ancestry tree that borrowed my Prendergasts and connected them to Pendergasts and created a mess.  McDonnells and MacDonalds, likewise.

Answer 3

Many of our ancestors' names had multiple variant spellings, and (as you've observed) this can mean that a cousin searching for one particular spelling will fail to discover a profile created with some other spelling.

Each person here can have only one Last Name at Birth (LNAB) and one Current Last Name, but we can (and should) use the Other Last Names data field to record all other variants that we are aware of. This will make those variant spellings visible to WikiTree's Name Search and I believe it will increase the chance that a person using another Internet search utility will find the profile.

Additionally, you could increase the chance that cousins will recognize this person in her profile if you give her a real biography in the text section of the profile. Currently, it looks like her life consisted of many repetitions of "Caroline Lafare in entry for..." If you could go beyond this by writing something like "Caroline Lafare was a daughter of ___ and ___, baptized on ______ at _____, [etc.]" with footnotes to identify the specific records that support each statement, you would make it easier for cousins to recognize her and I think you would feel much happier about the profile.