I frequently have people comment on the way I spell names in my database and say their ancestors spelt it differently. So I thought it worth copying a paragraph from a website on English Origins: <quote> _Background on surnames_ Unfortunately only a very small number of pedigrees of British families can be traced to the person who first used the surnames the families now bear. Many surnames have been corrupted to such an extent that their original forms may only be discovered after quite considerable research. This may involve tracing the pedigree step by step from the present backwards in time, not only to detect the changes but also to discover the area of the country from which the family came. Present day forms of a large number of surnames are due to the spelling of 16th or 17th century parsons, or even to the registrars of births in the 19th century. They had no guide to the spellings of names and attempted to reproduce phonetically the sounds they heard, as the great majority of the population were illiterate and had no notion that any one spelling of their name was more 'correct' than any other. All our original ancestors used a one-part name, whether they were Celts, Anglo-Saxons, Scandinavians or Normans. Certain people before the Norman conquest, and in growing numbers afterwards, had an additional 'byname', but these were not hereditary surnames in the modern sense as they did not pass from father to son. Most people in England did not, however, have anything approaching an hereditary surname until the end of the 14th century. The growing need for identification in mediaeval England had probably led the clerks to give people these additional names. They might be those of their fathers (patronymics) or of some other relation; or the name of the place where they lived or from which they had come (locative surnames); or the names of their offices or occupations; or some descriptive or nick-name. These additional names might vary considerably during a person's life, change from generation to generation, be changed at apprenticeship or be subject to translation by the clerks at their whim, so that the process by which they became fixed and passed from father to son was quite accidental. _Surname searching_ Suppose you wish to search for names which you know to exist with numerous variant spellings, what is the best way to approach this? Often common sense will suggest the best way to approach this problem, but you may have to be creative in some cases, because variant spellings can sometimes be quite bizarre. Do allow for common variants when you are searching, eg Cook, Cooke; Green and Greene (though see Boyd's Marriage Index); Mac and Mc; Humphries and Humphreys); if you still have no luck you may have to consider less common variants. Do not assume that any spelling of a name which you have obtained from one source will necessarily be the same spelling used for the same person in another source. While these differences are often due to transcription errors or mistakes in hearing a name pronounced, remember that not so long ago an individual did not necessarily pay much attention to how he or she spelled their own name; and members of the same family may have spelled their name differently. This can occur in official registrations even in the late 19th century. </quote> Sorry it is a bit long but hope it will help -- John Lewis <jayellatntlworlddotcom> from Bournemouth, Dorset, UK. using Debian GNU/Linux and GeneWeb genealogy software