Susan C <[email protected]> wrote: >How can we determine the correct person, if the spelling is/was >written Kerr when it is actually CARR?  Susan What do you mean "actually" CARR? You seem to be implying that there was a correct spelling of the surname and everything else was wrong. That may be true today, and indeed in the twentieth century, but in the nineteenth century and earlier, nothing could be further from the truth. Remember that, at that time, many, indeed most, people were illiterate. To them, their names were sounds. It was always other people who wrote their names. The vicar when they baptised a child or got married or buried; a solicitor when they wrote their will; a magistrate's clerk when they were charged with some misdemeanour - and each of them asked the person what their name was and wrote down their own version of that name. A poor person would only have their names recorded a very limited number of times, but it is quite possible that it was written differently each time. Nobody regarded any one spelling as "correct", they were all equally valid variants. Once literacy spread in the second half of the nineteenth century and people started reading and writing their own names, families began to settle on one spelling of their surnames and this then became their family's "correct" surname. But this process wasn't really complete until the end of the nineteenth century. Just to emphasise how little name spelling mattered in earlier times, let's look at William Shakespeare, who certainly wasn't illiterate or poor. There are six known examples of his signature and every single one is spelt differently. And when others wrote his name, things were much worse - there are literally dozens of variants, some, like Shaxper, just one-offs, and others which were common in Stratford, and others common in London. Today's accepted spelling of "Shakespeare" is a nineteenth century choice by scholars, Shakespeare himself never spelt his name this way. So please don't regard "Carr" as correct and "Kerr" as an error; in the 18th century, both were equally valid variants. "Carr" was simply the spelling choice of the first literate member of your particular branch of the family. There may be other distant branches of your family who made different choices. Brian -- Brian Pears (Joint List Admin - NORTHUMBRIA Mailing List)