The morning is quiet. Earlier, the rain and hail beat a staccato rhythm against the window as if it was trying to flee the gray and weary day. It’s a good day for writing, and thinking, and spending my time reflecting. Tim is working on the plumbing and playing computer games while he waits for the chemical concoction to fix the sink. The halfling discovered a virtual place called YouTube (kids’ version) where someone is battling a Creeper. I finished up the tasks that didn’t get done because I lost myself in old relatives yesterday.
Genealogy is a curious hobby. We poke our noses into people’s lives in order to get their stories and catalog their lives. The internet has created a much easier way to get information, but it is also unreliable in the validity of that information. I track my genealogy, and Tim’s because I’m nosy like that, in a program that links to online databases. Yesterday, I discovered a record for a man named Brenster. Everything about him matched my relative. His birth date, the location, his death information, even his spouse and children. The one thing that did not match was his name. The name listed in the source was Brewster.
Most people would have looked at the wrong name and moved on. But I’m not most people. I pulled up the image file of the original source. As usual for 1800s era script, they wrote the entry in flowy cursive letters that were more about flair than accuracy. And when the person who did the data entry typed it into the program, they made a common error of transcription. The “w” was mistaken for an “n”.
One of the particularly frustrating things about this program is that there does not appear to be a way to alert the program developers of the problem. I put a note in the person’s genealogical record and left it at that. Future genealogists will have to sort out the discrepancy later.
I encounter that problem all the time. I tell others who engage in this study to look at the primary documents and not to rely on the abstracts and indexes. My surname comes in a variety of spellings and am frequently required to search all the iterations because search engines don’t always cover the variations. One such spelling error actually opened a locked door for me because the was a correction to the official record that was made by my great grandmother and a grand aunt. If I had relied solely on the abstract of the record, I never would have found my grand aunt and her family. It’s on a different line than the one we share, so no need for you to look for it.
My maiden name has a similar issue where every line seems to have it’s own spelling. I’m glad you were able to make progress on it.