I think that dialects and accents may have had a lot to do with spelling problems - perhaps even more than illiteracy. After all, if you couldn't write at all but locals were familiar with your surname and forename, then the recorder (registrar, parish priest, enumerator) would have a decent chance to get it right more or less. In one of the families I'm working on, I can track the morphing of the forename Belinda to Blenda as the family moved from Herefordshire to Gloucestershire, then to Cumberland and eventually to County Durham and by the present into Yorkshire. Belinda is almost never seen in County Durham so it must have been difficult for a registrar. I have no trouble imagining my West Country coal miner telling the northern registrars or enumerators the name of his daughter and finding that they hadn't heard the name before. By the way, I was completely unable to convince the recent holders of this forename, how it had come about. They had a cute little family story and weren't about to abandon it in the face of well-documented evidence. Irene

From: "Irene Marlborough" <imarlb@sbcglobal.net> > In one of the families I'm working on, I can track the morphing of > the forename Belinda to Blenda as the family moved from Herefordshire to > Gloucestershire, then to Cumberland and eventually to County Durham > and by the present into Yorkshire. Belinda is almost never seen in County > Durham so it must have been difficult for a registrar. I have no trouble > imagining my West Country coal miner telling the northern registrars or > enumerators the name of his daughter and finding that they hadn't heard the name > before. < The British Surname Atlas program on CD - which covers forenames as well as surnames in the 1881 census - confirms your belief. In the 1881 census the greatest number of females (at least I'm assuming they were all female) were found in Middlesex, which of course included a large part of London. Middlesex had 124 Belindas, next came Lancashire with 79 followed by Cornwall (54), Norfolk (53) and Kent (50) while Gloucestershire had 30. Co Durham had only 10. The grand total for the name Belinda was 877. There were of course other variants but BLENDA accounted for only 19 entries, none of them in Co Durham. Some of these may have been misspellings. A popularity chart shows that the name barely existed (fewer than 10 references were not mapped) before 1801-1811 and then climbed steadily, increasing between censuses until there were 198 females with the name Belinda born between 1871-1881. -- Roy Stockdill Genealogical researcher, writer & lecturer Newbies' Guide to Genealogy & Family History: www.genuki.org.uk/gs/Newbie.html "There is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about." OSCAR WILDE

Thanks to Roy for his info on the forename Belinda. The first incumbent of the mangled version, Blenda, was born in Dec 1881 and so missed the census by a few months. Her birth was actually registered as Blender (you can hear the West Country burr, can't you). Her aunt Belinda was still alive having been born in Gloucestershire in 1862. She was married and living in Washington, Co. Durham in 1881. This one was also named after an aunt born in 1823. But my first Belinda appears in 1795 in Herefordshire. It makes me wonder where the name came from. This family named their first child Belinda even though they followed standard naming patterns for subsequent children. Sorry to have wandered so far from Yorkshire but there are 2 current holders of the name both living in Yorkshire so it does count. Best wishes, Irene