John Sents wrote: > > How's the best way to handle entering multiple surname spelling > variations in my genealogy program... when the person used different > ones or the records show different ones? For my purposes, I use (a) the spelling used today in my living family or (b) the spelling I found first. When I find the immigrant name outside the 3-mile limit, I change it for the immigrant's parents backward in time. I don't say these are without objection, and I won't present them as "best", but they work for me. When I copy out the content of the document into the NOTES/More Abouts, I copy spelling as I find it there. Since it's easy to find a document where even the educated played spelling games with their names (Was it Jefferson or Franklin who didn't trust a man who could spell his name only one way?) anything else strikes me as pointless. Now, it's TRUE that I have a William Harmison of IL who may or may not be the same man as William Harmeson of OH who is the brother to Samuel Harmeson whose descendants all use eson ... but I don't have enough info on my man and they don't have enough info on theirs to be able to tell. Cheryl singhals@erols.com