Name Changes... There are three fundamental reasons why spellings of surnames vary enormously: 1) Most of our ancestors until the middle of the 19th century were illiterate, or barely so, 2) Only in the 18th century, with the publication of the first English language dictionary, Samuel Johnson's, did society begin to adopt standardized spelling. Before then the rule was as often as not spell a word any way you like, so long as its pronunciation seemed normal (I've read many documents from 17th century New England in which the same word----I'm speaking of normal words, not proper names----might be spelled as many as three or four different ways), and 3) Only in the 19th century did society begin to keep formal records, a very strong impetus for standardizing spellings. The moral is don't read a lot into a particular spelling. For given or surnames there may have been a dozen variations extant in the same document, among siblings or cousins, or in the next town. Use spelling variations for clues to possible relationships, but don't look at any one as the "right" one. For names there are no "right" spellings, other than the one a person chooses for their own name. Kelvin Kean Elverson PA USA