An Ancestor By Any Other Name

It is March 30th 1851 and a small army of middle-class men have a long day ahead. They have been given maps and a hard bound ledger book. Their mission is to enter the warren of back to back houses and take the English census. They have to. It's the law.

A huge challenge lies out there. Packed into those streets are miners, nailers, foundry workers and drovers. They are not given to academia and schooling has never been compulsory. There are those in the higher classes who believe it immoral to educate those at the bottom of society. Anyone able to spell their own name will be an anomaly.

That wouldn't be a huge problem, because the clerks all come from good families. They have years of grammar school behind them, so all they need to do is complete each census form for the working people. Unfortunately, this is 1851. The place is full of Celts.

The previous decade had seen mass emigration out of Ireland and Wales, as famine wracked the former and landlordism drove out the latter. The census clerks were about to do what has been done in every country throughout history, when presented with foreign names for official registers. They were going to improvise.

"I'm sorry, could you repeat that?" The well-dressed, beautifully spoken clerk asked my ancestor.

In his Gaelic brogue, John tries again. He is attempting to tell the official that his surname is Taidhg. It is certainly not a word that the gentleman has encountered before. After hearing it a couple of times, he notes down the closest approximation in the English language. 'John Toy' was duly recorded on the census.

Of course, John was used to this. When he married his wife, the registrar at the church had faltered too. His best guess had been 'Tie'. A year later, John's brother entered matrimony as 'James Tye'.

As both families baptized their children, a succession of clerics had similar trouble. Taidhg variously ended up as 'Tigh', 'Tay', 'Tee', 'Toye', 'Teague', 'Tague' and finally 'Tighe', all within the same generation.

Eventually, as education grew and became compulsory, a schoolteacher will inform a child how he or she should be spelling their name. If this was the first time it happened in your family, then that would standardize it.

It is only within the last 100 years that your family's surname was fixed to what you now use. It is important to remember this, when searching for your ancestors in the archives and databases. This does not pertain only to Gaelic names nor even anything that was unusual. If the family didn't have a set way of spelling their surname, then it was up to the clerks to jot down whatever they thought appropriate.

If you suspect your family might have struggled with spelling their surname, then help is at hand.

• In database searches, uncheck the box that says 'exact' spelling. This will widen the search to an unwieldy level, but you might find your illiterate ancestor suddenly reappears.
• If there is no 'exact' box, then look for 'soundex' and tick that one instead. It will do the same thing.
• Recreate the circumstances in which those names were recorded. Say your surname aloud several times and jot down all of the ways it could be heard.
• Look at where your ancestor was born. Now try saying your surname in their accent; or ask someone from that area to say it for you. Make a note of what you actually hear.

Back in 1851, a few streets away, the clerk has just met a branch of my Welsh family. Here it is not just a matter of understanding what the foreigners are saying, but rearranging a whole naming convention. Hereditary surnames came late to Wales and they were still getting used to the whole idea.

Until the English imported the concept, in order to maintain their own records, individuals tended to be identified by their given name and something particular to them, like the relationship with one of their parents.

"Your name please?"

"Sion ap Rhys." In his lilting Welsh accent, the words rolled together like a song.

The clerk stared. That didn't even sound like a proper name. "In English please."

Since the days of the Tudor kings, successive laws had tried to stamp out the Welsh language. Even monoglot Welsh speakers would have been told their English name by exasperated landlords and vicars. "John."  This was the Anglicized form of Sion.

"Your surname please."

This was tricky. He was Welsh. He didn't technically have one. But back home, there had been a lot of people called Sion. It was the most common male name in the country. He was distinguished from every other Sion in the village by adding his father's name - 'ap Rhys' meant 'son of Rhys.' Unfortunately no-one had ever told him what that was in English.

"Erm, son of Rhys?"

The clerk was tired. Elsewhere he had got around this issue by simply adding a nice English patronymic. All of the 'ap Sion' men had become 'Jones'. With the Welsh emphasis on the first syllable, it had worked better than 'Johnson' or 'Jonson'. But he didn't have a clue either about this Rhys word. It all sounded way too distastefully Welsh.

"Say it in your tongue again."

"Ap Rhys."

There was an English word somewhere in the phonetics. The clerk duly entered 'Sion ap Rhys' as 'John Price'. Elsewhere, his colleagues were busily turning 'ap Ragnel' into 'Prangnell', 'Pragnell' 'Pringle' and 'Pangnall'. They were doing the same to a lot of other names.

Of course, they also had to enter the place of birth. Tiggunnernon was what the clerk in 1871 heard my great-great grandmother say.

It wasn't a bad guess for the spelling of Tregynon. He did better than the man who interviewed her father. He gave up completely and merely wrote 'John Jones, Wales'.

If you know or suspect that your family once hailed from a different culture, then it can help greatly to research the naming conventions in that country. Even today, they are not standard across the world and, in the past, there were many more besides.