"Virginia Beck" <ginia2@san.rr.com> wrote: > A cousin in my husband's line located us, and the rest of > her REAL family through her ggf's Civil War pension file! Her > entire family thought their last name was PECK throughout their > lives. They ran into such brick walls researching that name that > she & her mother even hired a professional genealogist, who came up > with an entire multi-generation Peck family tree for them,! Lo and > behold, when the file came, GGrandpa John Peck's parents names were > given as William & Maria BECK -- & they had to start over at square > one. We will probably never know why he changed the spelling. The reason you will probably never know why "he changed the spelling" is that he didn't change the spelling. The metamorphis of German surnames beginning with B to names which beginning with the letter P is a very common occurrence. So long as the German families remained in areas where there were quite a few Germans (or were well-educated and insisted on maintaining the original spelling), the names remained much as they likely were in the old country. Once away from that influence, however, they got spelled the way they were pronounced. In many German dialects, B and P are pronounced as P. That's why in Pennsylvania there are many BENTZ families. Once you go to Virginia's Shenandoah Valley, where a great many Germans migrated, the name was written by the English-speaking clerks as it was pronounced to them. So BENTZ immediately became PENCE there and in many places in Ohio and elsewhere. There are many other such transformations - Brentz to Prince, Briess to Price, Bender to Painter and, of course, Beck to Peck. Often, because many in those days could not read or write, the families were not even aware of the change in spellings. In this case, since the record showed the father's name as Beck, the son apparently realized what was happening and simply accepted it - it being an "Americanization" of the name. I have a copy of a letter written in the 1830s from Michael Bentz in York County, Pennsylvania, to his (first) cousin, John Pence in Warren County, Ohio. The letter is written a beautiful hand and with good English, indicating Michael was well education. In his letter says he still prefers to spell his name "the old way" (Bentz) but that many of "the English" call him Pence. John's father was born in York County about 1770 and baptized as Johan Jacob Bentz. Shortly before 1800, he moved to Rockingham County, Virginia, where his name was written as Pence and it remained as such when the family moved to Ohio in about 1815. Klaus Wust, the German-born historian who has written a great deal about German immigrants to the U.S., particularly Virginia, often included a list of variant spellings for German surnames in his books. In one (Klaus Wust, The Record of Hawksbill Church, 1788-1850, Page County, Va. [Edinburg, Va.: Shenandoah History, 1979], 33), he included this item: "Sauer, Saur, Sower, Sour or Benz, Bentz, Pents, Pens, Brentz, Brintz, Printz, Prenntz, Prince-we could make endless lists of variations. A long time ago James Kirke Paulding told the story of Kierst von Guelph, the imaginary poor relation of King George I who, after failing to make all people in Virginia talk High-German, contented himself with turning English upside down: Thus P became B, and B became P, and D T until the stoutest abecedarian could hardly tell which was which." Regards, Richard "Richard A. Pence" <richardpence@pipeline.com>