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From: Alan Bardsley <> (by way of Geoffrey <>)
Subject: [SoG] Re: List
Date: Tue, 06 Mar 2001 12:13:16 +0000


If I could just expand on John Addis-Smith's comments on my work on
First Name Variants. Variants of first names and surnames arise for
entirely different reasons and hence entirely different ways. Surnames
have kept constant as they are related to a family group and it makes no
sense to change it. The majority of the variants arose through simple
phonetic spelling and illiteracy as is evidenced by the relative success
of Soundex. Better algorithms can no doubt now be derived, but
transcription errors will always be with us.

First names are totally different. There are about 1300 English usage
original forenames. The problem arises though because only three each of
these for boys (William, John, Thomas) and girls (Elizabeth, Mary, Anne)
were used for 50% of baptisms for 500 years from the 13th century. To
distinguish one Elizabeth from another over 200 diminutives have
developed. The majority by, now well understood, linguistic rules,
shortening, rhyming, letter changing, etc. and then compounded by
phonetics and illiteracy.

When I did my original work in 1990 there was no literature on working
diminutives backwards but of course much on derivation. I quickly came
to the conclusion that the only way was a manual trawl of sources and a
simple listing. That only took 3 years out of my leisure time. The 1851
2% sample contained 8500 different forenames of which 5400 occurred only
once in the total of some 500,000. In choosing what to publish in a book
my list was curtailed by the economics of book size by eliminating the
minor spelling variants that could still easily be identified in an
index.

It may be of interest that the US 1880 census has some 34,000 different
forenames, no doubt reflecting other languages than English and yet more
phonetic variations.

Surnames or forenames, there can only be useful aids, an algorithm would
be hard pressed to identify Veta came from Elizabeth and was Tina a
Christine or a Clementine. That's genealogy.

(Original census listings courtesy of Rosemary Lockie)

Regards
Alan Bardsley
Macclesfield, UK



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