Accents and differing literacy and language mean it’s common to find multiple ways of spelling names in official and unofficial records. Then there are people who go by different variations of their name, sometimes in documentation, and sometimes because of nicknames, or to help tell the difference between people in the same family who share a name. For women there are also both maiden names and married names to consider.

This means it’s important to broaden research terms to capture possible variations of names. Here are just a few examples I’ve discovered in my own family tree.

On his 1821 baptism record, my 3x great-grandfather is recorded as Primeiron Frank Harris. He began using the surname Grant when he was ten. Across his lifetime, I’ve found him referred to as: Primeiron, Primiron, Primeion, Francis, Frank and Frances! Added to the challenge is that two of his sons were named Francis and Frederick Primiron. Cross-checking other details has been important to distinguish between father and sons.

My 3x great-grandmother, convict Mary Ann Rankin, has also been recorded in Australia and her native Scotland with the given names May and Marion, and her surname also spelled Rankine and Ranken. She appears as both Mary Ann and Marion in criminal records. During her life she was also known by Lowe, her first husband’s name, by her defacto spouse William’s surname which was spelled both Vaughan and Vaughn, and by Gorman which was her second husband’s surname.

Two other branches of my family have been connected to Australia since the 1790s and early 1800s. The Spears and Humphreys surnames have been spelled in many different ways. Humphreys has also been written Humphries and Humphryes, while Spears has also been written as Speers, Spiers, and Speirs.

In Scotland my 4x great-grandmother, Elizabeth Tevendale has been recorded under both Elizabeth and the diminutive Betty, and her family name has also been recorded as Tavendale and Teviotdale. Another 4x great-grandmother, Helen Addison‘s family name was spelled Edison and Eddison, and the Sklatter surname, which I believe to be from Helen’s maternal grandfather’s ancestry, has been spelled Sclatter, Sclater, and even Slater.

The lesson of all this is to keep a checklist to help with researching multiple name variations.