Granfalloon

Over the last month of working on my genealogical research, I’ve learned that names and spelling in various records are often inconsistent. This can make determining the “correct” way to spell someone’s name a bit tricky. Spelling was not taken as seriously 100 years ago as it is now, and literacy rates were lower than they are today. I remember reading somewhere that spelling a name phonetically was often more important than spelling it “correctly,” because for people with differing reading abilities, being able to pronounce the name was more important than being able to write it.  To make a genealogist’s work even harder, sometimes handwriting on old documents is hard to read, and scanned images might be blurry. These challenges can cause transcription errors when a document is digitized, as seen in this example from Ancestry.com: Source: AncestryInstitution.com, accessed from the Historical Society of Pennsylvania Of course I know that my paternal grandmother went by the name Sadie,