The Corruption of Names
posted Wednesday, July 24, 2019
Essay: The Corruption of Names
Most cultures contain within their most primal beliefs the idea that Names have Power.
You see this idea pop up in fantasy stories about magic, in mystical belief systems, and in most creation stories - for example, Adam's first act in the Garden of Eden was to name the creatures being created. (The first taxonomist!) It is also true in modern society, where your username gains you access to the world and where your "personal brand" is often more important than the substance of what you sell under that brand.
In genealogy, the first thing most novice researchers focus on is their collection of names. It can be thrilling to find a name you recognize attached to your ancestors, especially if it's a famous name. My paternal grandfather, for example, knew that his maternal grandmother's name was "Hale," and I grew up hearing that we were "probably related to Nathan Hale" based solely on the power of that name connection. As far as I have been able to discover, we have no family connection to the 21-year-old American spy, and he died unmarried and childless.
As important as names are, it can be brutally difficult for a researcher to figure out what a person's name actually was, and how to find that person in historical records. Today I wanted to talk about one example of how someone's name became a puzzle.
From Name to Record
We don't often think about how names get attached to a person, or how those names get recorded, but when you do think about it, the process starts to resemble the old Telephone game. Before a name gets to you, the researcher, it can go through several layers:
the people who pick the name
the person who uses the name
the people who know the person
the people who record the name
transcribers and indexers
As with the Telephone game, errors can creep in at any point between any of these layers. I've seen countless examples where parents have used one name for their child only to have that child prefer to use a middle name or an alternate spelling later in life. My great-grandmother Hannah Merle was named "Hannah" after her grandmother but went by "Merle" or the diminutive "Merly" until her death in 1984. My great-uncle, Byron Herbert Callin, was called "Byron" in his youth but preferred to use the more distinguished-sounding (to his ears) "Herbert" in his career as an educator.
There are, of course, nicknames: Jack for John; Libby for Elizabeth; Sadie for Sarah; Polly for Mary; and Dick for Richard. These are pretty common even if they don't always make sense to later generations, and some of them have taken on a life of their own. I've seen countless examples of people who were christened with a pet name or diminutive like "Billie," or "Johnny."
As these names get written down, there can be a mix of factors that lead to some wildly different recorded results. Let's take a look at one person whose name looks different on almost every record: Eliza Alice "Lydia" Reed Donaldson (1866-1951).
Following the Records
The first record I had that named Eliza was The Callin Family History record of her mother, which identified her as "Eliza, married, five children living." Great-Uncle George did not cite his sources for his information in the CFH, but we might assume from the newspaper reports of Callin Family Reunions that occurred in Ohio during the early 1900s that gatherings of distant cousins would share what they knew, and he probably collected the names of his cousin Elizabeth's children at one of those gatherings.
The earliest public record I have is her family's appearance in the 1870 U.S. Census, where her name is given simply as "Eliza" - here is how her name seems to have evolved each time she appears in the Census (as transcribed for Ancestry):
1870: Eliza (Reed)
1880: Eliza A. (Reed)
1900: Lisa A. (Donaldson)
1910: Leda A. (Donaldson)
1930: Eliza (Donaldson)
1940: Liza Alise (Donaldson)
The game of telephone becomes really apparent when you consider how the Census records get to us. First, of course, you have the family that knows the information; then you have the enumerator who writes down the information; and after 70 years or more, the records are scanned and transcribed by a human being to create the index we search against.
Since we don't know who told the census enumerator the names of the Reed or Donaldson families in each of these records, we don't know for sure what the family actually told them. The three records where our girl is listed as "Eliza" are pretty straightforward - the enumerators of those records wrote clearly, and the indexes were transcribed accurately. But the other three are harder to read, and make the name more ambiguous:
If we assume that Norman gave the enumerator his wife's information, it's possible that he said "Liza" each time, but the different enumerators heard it differently. Of the three, only 1910 is clearly written with a "d" in "Lida" or "Leda" - and while it's not a common name today, "Lida" was a fairly familiar name in the Midwest at the turn of the 20th century. (Familiar enough for a song with that name to appear in the 1962 Broadway musical The Music Man!)
Taking all of these records together, I'm inclined to believe that her given name was actually "Eliza" and that everyone knew her by the nickname "Liza" - but there are more records to consider.
The Indiana, Marriages, 1810-2001 database on Ancestry is very useful, as it provides the names of the bride, groom, and both sets of parents, in addition to the marriage date and location. As with the Census, though, we don't know who is providing the information on the record, and we don't know which human being(s) were involved in digitizing and transcribing the records for the index. At the least, I think it's safe to assume that the bride and groom gave their parents' names to the county clerk. So, with that assumption in mind, here are the variations of Eliza's maiden name as known to her children:
Year / Groom / name given for mother:
1916 / Russel Donaldson / Lydia Reed
1917 / James A Donaldson / Lida Reed
1926 / Gerald Donaldson / Elizabeth Reed
1927 / Glenn L. Donaldson / Lyda Reed
1927 / Newell Donaldson / Lida Reed
Note: I linked the names of the grooms to the original record images at FamilySearch.org so you can examine them for yourself. With one exception, they appear to have been transcribed accurately; Russel's document clearly says "Lida," though, and was incorrectly transcribed as "Lydia":
This tells me that four of her five sons knew her maiden name as "Lida Reed" - and they probably all knew that was a nickname, but Gerald thought that "Lida" was short for "Elizabeth."
Oh, Have You Met Lydia?
As I pointed out, one transcriber seems to have misread "Lida" as "Lydia" - possibly not knowing that Lida was a popular nickname, or thinking that it was a shortened version of Lydia. There are two other records that list Eliza's name as "Lydia," however, which could either mean she started using that name later in life for some reason, or that this is a very common mistake.
The first example, chronologically, is the Death Certificate of her husband, Norman Donaldson, who died on 3 December 1940. This is a typewritten document that can be found in the Indiana, Death Certificates, 1899-2011 database on Ancestry.com. Oddly, the transcriber entered the name in the index as "Ludia," but the document quite clearly gives her name as the wife of the deceased: "Lydia D."
The second example is another Death Certificate, this time for Eliza's son, James, from 20 July 1951, again from the Indiana, Death Certificates, 1899-2011 database. This record is also clearly typewritten, and gives the mother's maiden name as "Lydia Reed."
In the first example, the informant is recorded as "Newton Donaldson," which either refers to Norman's brother, or to Norman and Eliza's son, Newell Donaldson (1900-1962). If they were referring to the latter, then the clerk botched the name of the informant, and that makes me suspect that Newell probably gave her name as "Lyda" and the clerk got that wrong, too. In the second example, the wife of the deceased, Celestia Donaldson, is the informant. The clerk did a much better job spelling the name of the informant on this document, but given the patterns we've seen in other records, I'm inclined to think that either Celestia didn't know her mother-in-law's name was "Lyda" or (more likely) the clerk just corrupted it into Lydia, as we've seen done elsewhere. It's possible, if the informant on Norman's death certificate was Newton, that both clerks made the same error.
Conclusion
Based on the totality of the available evidence, I have recorded Eliza's name as "Eliza A. 'Lyda' Reed" with alternate names included to highlight the one record that gives her middle name as "Alise." And while I will refer to her as "Lyda," since that seems to have been the name she was known by, I tend to give the final authoritative word on what someone's name is to whatever the family is willing to set in stone.
Taking the extra steps needed to figure out simple facts can be tough - do you have a puzzle like this that is making it hard for you to learn everything you can? Drop a comment or send me an email; I’m happy to take a look.
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