-----Original Message----- From: Terry Smith <seeme@snowhill.com> Date: Monday, January 10, 2000 12:23 AM Subject: Names misspelled on the CENSUS Hi All, Speaking of census enumerator's mistakes, here's one that you'd think would be obvious, but has caused our family's researchers a LOT of grief lately. While reading the hand written 1870 Census for Ballard Co,KY we came face to face with what I think COULD be a common mistake. One we should all probably watch out for --- my 2G-GF M.F. FIELDS was listed @ #92 and his brother Robert L. FIELDS was listed @ # 94 on that census. That info. is correct. However, even though they were from the same family & spelled their surname the same in all family docs we have, it looks as if the enumerator was not as careful as he should've been about dotting the "i" and looping the "e" in the FIELDS surname. OR--- he could've been dyslexic, OR tired and reversed the "i" and "e" when writing down the name. Well, maybe he was just getting "cross-eyed" by then <s>. Who knows? Whatever the case, just looking at the 2 different spellings we knew this to be obvious error. Sometimes the name looked like FIELDS and some times the name looked like FEILDS, in BOTH families enumerated. BUT the LDS had picked up on the spellings as TWO DIFFERENT families with TWO DIFFERENT surnames and has them listed as such in their databases all over the Internet !!! At best our FIELDS family is difficult to track, but this error really threw us, mainly because the FEILDS spelling is NOT listed in the SOUNDEX, so does NOT turn up in during normal searches ! So remember, just two tiny little letters reversed is all it took to cause major confusion in our research because someone may have for- gotten that little rule we all learned in school: "I" before "E" when after "C", except when sounding like "A" as in neighbor and weigh. <s> Terry & Martha