I’ve heard many people say, “That can’t be my ancestor because we spell our name differently.” In my research, it turned out that Susannah Smith Tisdale and Susanah Teasdale were exactly the same person!
Beginning genealogists often disregard valid information on an ancestor simply because of how a name is spelled.
We enjoy a much more formal education than our ancestors did. They may not have been able to read or write English or even to speak the language well. It’s easy to imagine how a town clerk could record Johnson when speaking to an older German man named Janzen or how a census taker in the Deep South could mistakenly record Tisdale for Teasdale. National and regional dialects can also dramatically affect the way a name might be spelled phonetically. And some of our ancestors anglicized their names intentionally, while others simply preferred a new spelling. The spelling of the name doesn’t change who that person was—after all, how often has someone misspelled your name?
There is a secret to keeping all the names straight! It is called Soundex! Soundex was developed to address the name-spelling problems of the 1880 census, and it has remained a valuable tool for family historians ever since.
A Soundex name always contains four characters, no more and no less. The first letter of the name becomes the first character of the Soundex code. The remaining three numbers are drawn from the name sequentially - refer to the chart below.
1 | b p f v |
2 | c s k g j q x z |
3 | d t |
4 | l |
5 | m n |
6 | r |
no code (0) | a e h i o u y w |
Some letters in a name are ignored. When adjacent letters are from the same category, the second is ignored. For instance, Smith would be S530, and Blakeney would be B425.
Many of the online search engines, as well as the newer genealogy software programs, offer a Soundex calculator for free. My favorite is http://www.searchforancestors.com/utility/soundex.html