Hi I would be interested to hear how you treat this matter when the surname for one person is spelt differently in nearly every document you find. ie. Dakar, Dyker, Dykar, Dikker, Daker I put a note with the Source Documentation that the name is spelt thus on that document but would be interested to hear of any other methods. My friend has 26 different variants of his family name. regards Pauline Melbourne, Australia

My own methodology is to use the features built into the GEDCOM standard. Ie: I record the name in the name field as it appears in the record I've found and the source of that record. For variants I simply record an alternate name fact and source that fact. The variant that I think should be used is the one I mark as the preferred fact. Typically this is the spelling as per an original document. However with early records you often find the same person with multiple different spellings in the ORIGINAL documents this is simply because it's how the clerk writing the document heard the name. In which case I try to go with the most "consistent" one, but would record all variants I found in case it helped future searches. I would never ever use brackets in the middle of a name or at the end as this will utterly screw up any form of matching software that might automate your searching. Far far better to use the provided features of your software and simply record multiple facts. On the spelling of Garden as Gairden I can well imagine a clerk today writing Garden as Gairden if he just heard it. An Aberdeenshire native today with a strong accent would usually pronounce Garden as Gair-den. As in "I wis oot potterin aboot in my gairden, fin ye caad." Translation "I was out spending some time in my garden, when you called." With apologies to anyone who can write Scots/Doric I was attempting to imply phonetic spellings rather than true Scots/Doric spellings. -- Alexander Bisset IT Administrator Aberdeen Harbour Board -----Original Message----- From: aberdeen-bounces@rootsweb.com [mailto:aberdeen-bounces@rootsweb.com] On Behalf Of Pauline Lyons Sent: 31 March 2010 08:52 To: aberdeen@rootsweb.com Subject: [ABERDEEN] variant name spellings Hi I would be interested to hear how you treat this matter when the surname for one person is spelt differently in nearly every document you find. ie. Dakar, Dyker, Dykar, Dikker, Daker I put a note with the Source Documentation that the name is spelt thus on that document but would be interested to hear of any other methods. My friend has 26 different variants of his family name. regards Pauline Melbourne, Australia ------------------------------- To unsubscribe from the list, please send an email to ABERDEEN-request@rootsweb.com with the word 'unsubscribe' without the quotes in the subject and the body of the message ______________________________________________________________________ This message has been checked by Dionach for all known viruses using MessageLabs Virus Scanning Service. For further information visit http://www.dionach.com ______________________________________________________________________ This message has been checked by Dionach for all known viruses using MessageLabs Virus Scanning Service. For further information visit http://www.dionach.com