AutomatedGenealogy.com

[Maureen Anderson]

Perhaps something like this has already been posted and if so, I am sorry to be posting again. I do a lot of sleuthing for surnames and would appreciate hearing of things other people have found useful in deciphering surnames. I have found the following sites to be of great value in deciphering names for both proofreading and transcription. I know that many don’t want to go to this much work, but for those that do, these are things that have helped me in my search. I would guess that in some areas where names are difficult to read, the accuracy of the transcription (or at least of being able to add a meaningful surname note) increases by at least 50%. I have proofread pages where almost every surname on a page was transcribed so differently from the true name that no researcher would have a chance of recognizing it in the index. Just recently, I became aware of the Sask. Civil Birth Reg and have found it extremely useful. It makes me wonder if there are other tools that I am not using that would help. I have only transcribed in 1911, so any reference to images is usually for 1911.

Saskatchewan Homestead Index (SHIP) http://www.saskhomesteads.com/search.asp
You can find the land description in the header on the census page - ie) Twp14 Rg14 W2. Sometimes the section number is given as an address beside the head of household. If you can only read the given name well and part of the surname, you can enter the given name in the box at the top and put in only the Twp Rg and Meridian and you will get a list of all of the ie) Williams in that Twp. If you suspect the name may have different spellings you can use the contains drop down menu and put in Joh - that will give you all listings for John, Johann, Johan, etc. Then look for one with similar surname. I have found that sometimes when one finds a name that looks similar, a surname that originally appeared to be illegible, suddenly is very readable. I generally try to back up the likely surnames with links to the 1901 or 1906 census. I go on the assumption, that if other members of the family have the same given names, the ID is likely correct. If one cannot see enough of the surname to make a verification, one can input the name with letters and ? marks and make a surname note for the most likely correct name citing the sources used to make the assumption. The 1906 census has a land description on the far right of the line (often off the page in higher magnifications). This can be used to verify that a family with similar given names, but a modified surname is likely the same as one found in 1911.

Saskatchewan Health Vital Statistics Registration (link updated Oct 2008)
https://www.isc.ca/VitalStatistics/Genealogy/vsgs_srch.aspx
Not a lot of children were registered, but some can be found. I find this index particularly useful for tracking down names of families that came after 1906 - there is no census available for confirmation of family names. If you cannot completely read the surname, you can use the “contains” drop down and put in the part of the surname that you can read. Sometimes I search for all entries of the partial surname that occurred before 1912. You can usually read the given names of family members, so you can search for given names in the index that match the parents. You could also search for the child by its given name. I usually set the number of records per page to 50 so I can quickly search a lot of records. If many records are produced, by the search, you can use the “edit” - “find in this page” option from the top menu on the browser (works in Netscape, don’t know about other browsers) to search for names in the list quickly. For example, perhaps you do not know the correct spelling for the child’s name and you think it would be easier to find a parent with an unusual name - ie) Magdalena. You can type that name into the search and it will jump to the first person on the page with that name.

Saskatchewan Local History Books
Many towns in Saskatchewan had local history books published in connection with the 75th & 100th birthdays of Saskatchewan. These were written by committees from the towns. In many cases, great efforts were made to contact relatives of anyone that ever lived in the town so that a family history could be submitted for the book. These family histories can be a great source of information for verifying names. Given names not available in other census records because the person was born after 1906 or surnames where only the first few letters are legible can often be deciphered so that a correct surname or an alternate surname can be offered. Most books have the family histories printed in alphabetical order by surname, so it is not too difficult to search surnames beginning with a certain letter and use the given names of the family members to verify that the correct family has been located. There are often separate sections in the books about businesses, schools, etc. Sometimes one can see the person's occupation in the census record which can then be used to decipher the surname by looking in that section of the book. There is a website that has copies of some of these books. This is the link.
http://www.ourroots.ca/e/index.aspx

Index to WWI records
http://www.collectionscanada.gc.ca/databases/cef/001042-100.01-e.php

Manitoba Vital Statistics - Births, Marriages & Deaths.
http://web2.gov.mb.ca/cca/vital/Query.php

New Brunswick Civil Records - Births, Marriages & Deaths
http://archives.gnb.ca/APPS/GovRecs/VISSE/default.aspx?culture=en-CA

Western Land Grants - Library & Archives of Canada.
http://www.collectionscanada.gc.ca/archivianet/western-land-grants/001007-100.01-e.php
I don’t think you can search for partial names in this index, but sometimes you do find different people than were listed in the SHIP listings.

I find the “edit” - “find in this page” feature very useful in many situations. It is also good for searching for surnames in surname lists. For example, if the surname is Ramble, but you are not sure it will be spelled Ramble, Rumble, etc., in 1906, you can get the R surname list for 1906 and type in “mble” and check out all surnames that end that way. It saves some time getting to places in lists.

Genealogy sites
Rootsweb - http://rootsweb.com/
Ancestry - http://www.ancestry.com/ can be useful for verifying information . I have found many submitted trees that verified surnames and given names.

Website for the Church of Latter Day Saints Genealogical Data Base
http://www.familysearch.org/
Gives access to transcribed versions of the 1880(1) census records for Canada, USA & Britain + submitted family trees and the International Genealogical Index (IGI)

City directories: People have also found city directories published in the census year to be very helpful. If the address is given on the census record, one can cross reference the street address to people living at that address and get the surname and given name for the head of household. Usually given names are legible on the census, so if they are the same, one can sometimes determine the surname.

When all else fails, if I can link a family from 1911 to one in 1906 and both census records are in the same area, I search for other families in the area that I was not able to find in the adjacent pages of 1906. Sometimes the surnames are spelled differently or have ? marks in them that makes searching for them in the 1906 index very difficult. Sometimes a given name of a child or parent is very unusual and that is the name that I look for in the 1906 census. Often a surname that could not be read well in one census record is legible in another and using given names and land descriptions one can decipher that name.

[Andrew Cunningham]

On a more general level, I also look at FreeBMD and the Rootsweb or Genforum genealogy forums to determine whether an unlikely looking name in the census was actually a surname. E.g. if you have people of English origin and there is not a single occurrence of their supposed surname among the 100,000,000+ records of English people of the 1837-1919 period in FreeBMD, I would have another look at the name and see if it can be read another way that is actually a surname. Similarly, there are now thousands of surnames, including very obscure ones, that have Rootsweb and/or Genforum discussion forums devoted to them. If you have the first few letters of a name only, looking down the lists of surnames can give you a range of alternatives to consider.

For example, I might see something that seemed to be Middle------ and by looking through the Genforum "M" list see that it could be the rare English surname "Middleditch". http://genforum.genealogy.com/surnames/m.html

More than a few times have I been surprised to discover from FreeBMD than some very odd-looking surname was in fact an English surname, so this approach often produces a sort of confirmation as well. With English immigrants you can also certainly try to find their actual birth/marriage records in FreeBMD, particularly if they have unusual names or if there are a series of English-born children so that you can check to see if there were a Thomas, Jane and Edith [Surname] born at the right times, hopefully in the same place. You can leave a sticky note right on the FreeBMD record to direct searchers of that index to this site, as I have done quite a few times.

[Polly]

I've found the SK Health Vital Stats site the best of all, and have come across very few cases where children couldn't be found using the many search options offered, usually I just enter the year and even three letters of the name and then search on the right of the results page for both parents names.

As with the homestead index - the surname spellings can be WAY off, but I've really had good luck with both of them, much better than Manitoba's sites where only the mother's name is listed, and only after guessing at the correct entry and opening it. To me, the sleuthing is the best part.

[Geof Wyght]

If you want to continue transcribing

http://automatedgenealogy.com/census11/Test2.jsp?sdid=4617

please feel free to do so.

I will not not take the time to look into what you are suggesting to look into. No hard feelings...
_________________
That white patch is only sunlight!

[dot]

Andrew/or anybody

What is the link to FreeBMD please?

Another site I check when doing western Canada is the 1906 Alberta Family History site. They are not always correct either but it can sometimes help, especially with European names.

I also use local history books when available.

[Maureen Anderson]

When I made the reference to surnames that could be interpreted by consulting a source, I did not mean to imply that all surnames could be figured out. I had just finished proofreading a page where most of the surnames were fairly legible and it didn't take too much time to verify them, but most had been misinterpreted. There are some pages that I have seen that are so bad that I would not even consider trying to transcribe them - I imagine almost every name could be misinterpreted on some that I have seen and could never be verified as the images are so bad. I like puzzles and figuring out the names is a puzzle to me - but I will only give it a try where I feel I have a hope of succeeding.
Thanks for the England site information. I didn't know that existed. I have a few English ancestors I could try to find via that!
I realize the puzzle aspect of this is not for everyone and certainly don't expect everyone to be interested in consulting sources for their transcriptions. However, I could have succeeded in my searches much more quickly & easily if I had easy access to the links and or names of sites that could help and if I hadn't had to figure out all of the shortcuts on my own. Some things I had been doing in a very laborious fashion before I figured them out. My hope for this post was to share what I know about ways to verify names and, possibly, get some new ideas.
Thanks for the input so far. I am glad to hear that I am not the only one who finds figuring out the names an interesting part of the project.

[Andrew Cunningham]

http://www.freebmd.org.uk/cgi/search.pl

It is just an index, not the actual records themselves. All you get is the name and the quarter of the year (March, June, September, or December) in which the registration was made. You have to order the actual records separately. Thus if the names are common ones, you won't generally find this of much use.

[dot]

Thank you

Neat site

I will play there later.

[Alain Dawson]

After reading this set of posts, I decided that this was worthed to be a srticky.
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Alain

[Andrew Cunningham]

In terms of deciphering the writing, the #1 thing that I've learned is that when in difficulty, always look at the names before and after and mentally remove any extenders from those names (by which I mean the downstrokes in "y" "g" etc. from the name above and the upstrokes in "h" "l" etc. from the name below) from the name you're looking at.

It's amazing how often names are badly transcribed because someone (me being a prime example!) has failed to notice that part of what they're reading into the name is actually a piece of a letter belonging to a name above or below it.

[Maureen Anderson]

I made the following observations when proofreading 1911 census records from the MacKenzie District of Saskatchewan. One section had many people of Russian/Dukhobor descent and the other of Polish/Ukrainian descent. To say these areas were challenging is an understatement. Names were never spelled the same way twice in various indices. Please feel free to add to the list if you know of other variations. It might be best to just edit this message so that all of the variations stay together in the same document (if you can edit another person's message). Linking has been very difficult and yet in some ways, I feel, more necessary than in other areas as I am sure names were often badly misspelled because of language barriers. The first part of the message is from my observations in the census records, which may be more influenced by the particular ennumerators than by what is common in these languages. The second part of the message was contributed by someone who knows much about the Ukrainian, Russian and Polish languages and will be a much more reliable source of information on this topic.

Here is a site that gives English equivalents for some Polish names.
http://www.rootsweb.com/~polwgw/namelist.html#ukrainian

The same names may end in w, ow ov or off. For example, Birikoff may be Birikow or just Birikw
z may be ch or s
ch may be k
w may be v
j may be y
Examples:
Wojkyn in 1911 was Voyakin in 1906
Szlachow in 1911 was Schlakoff in 1901. There were so many to link that I am positive the families are the same.

Given names in earlier records like 1901 are often changed to English variations in later records (This list is no doubt a mixture of names from people of Ukrainian, Polish and Russian descent as I have now proofed records of people from all of these areas and did not keep separate lists). Further down in this message is a list of Ukrainian and Polish variations contributed by someone who knows much about those languages.

Iwan becomes John
Petro, Pietre, Peter
Demitre, Metro
Natasha, Nellie
Wasil, Wasyl, William
Misha, Mike, Michael
Yeui, George
Fedor, Fred
Wadyslaw, Walter
Yuskna, Josephine
Warwara, Barbara
Yulia, Julia

A friend that I have met via proofreading some Polish/Ukrainian census records has a very good knowledge of Polish and Ukrainian and has offered these insights.

I believe that family names ending in -iv-; -iw- are Ruthenian (Ukrainian) and Polish.

A few Russian/Dukobor family name endings are –off- and –ov- and -ev- and -in-. Names such as Popoff, Popov, Brezhnev and Putin.

ИЙ- (yi); Polish (ji)

Names ending with -sky- and skyi (Ukrainian); ...ski and skji (Polish). This becomes even more complicated ... Romanovsky (male); Romanovska (female). In the census, females stay with masculine spelling ... but if a female was on her own, her name may go down as feminine. It happened a lot on ships manifests when a female was travelling alone, or with her children.


There are also names ending with:

-АЙ- (i); for example, Бакай – Baki (Bakj – Polish)

-ЕЙ- (a); for example Белей - Bela

-ІЙ- (e or ey). For example, Бласій – Blase or Blasey (Blasej – Polish)

More surname endings:

....chuk; czuk (Polish)

....chak; czak (Polish)

....iuk

....enko

....ko

....lyk/lik

....ruk

....vych/vich; wycz (Polish)

....iak/yak

In the Russian Cyrillic alphabet there is no -H- sound, only -G-. All villages, towns and family names use the -G- sound. First names .... Halyna (UA) - Galina (RU); Hryhoriy (UA) - Grygoriy (RU)

The Ukrainian Cyrillic alphabet has the -H- and -G-. But there are only a handfull of words that begin with the letter -G-. All villages, towns and family names use the -H- sound.

Ukrainian sound Polish sound

ts c

ch cz

sh sz

shch szcz

ya/ia ja

v w

kh/ch

Polish and Ukrainian (Mixed):

John – Ivan, Ywan, Yvan, Iwan
Demitre, Metro – Dymitr, Dmytro
Wasil, Wasyl, William – Bazyli, Vasyl
Misha, Mike, Michael - Mykhailo
George - Iurii
Fedor, Fred - Fedir
Wadyslaw, Walter – Wladyslaw, Vladyslav
Stefana, Stefanka, Stepanka, is Stephanie
Nicholas, Nick, Nykola, Mykola, Mikolaj
Gregory - Many Polish, Russian and Ukrainian names are very similar if you remember Polish and Russians use the hard G where Ukrainians use H. In Ukrainian the Cyrillic letter associated with hard G by those who speak Russian is pronounced more like H.
Gregory in Polish - Grzegorz
in Ukranian - Hryhoriy, Hryhir (English phonetic values)
Hrycko is a Polish phonetical spelling of a Ukrainian name, which originated as a kind of nickname or affectionate diminutive for the name we use as "Gregory". Hrycko is pronounced by Poles roughly "H'ritskoh," which is very close to the way Ukrainians say it.
The Ukrainian version of "Gregory" is spelled "Hryhoriy" (English phonetic values); it is also seen in forms such as Hryhir. The Ukrainians liked to create short forms or nicknames by taking the first few letters of a first name, dropping the rest, and then adding various suffixes. So from Hryhoriy they took Hry-, dropped the rest, and added the sound of -ts- (which Poles spell -c-). This makes Ukrainian "Hryts" kind of like "Greg" in English. Then they added the diminutive suffix -ko to make Hrytsko, which would be somewhat like "Greggie" in English (although we don't normally use that diminutive). Poles, hearing the name Hrytsko, would tend to spell it Hrycko. There are lots of Ukrainian nicknames from Hryhoriy, including ones we'd spell Hrynko, Hryhorko, Hrunko, Hryshko, and so on. This particular name generated a lot of diminutives that, at first glance, don't seem to be connected with the original name!

Ignatius (Latin version) - in Polish - "Ignacy"
in Ukrainian - "Ihnatiy" - short forms of the name are "Ihnat" and "Hnat"

The reason we often see Polish-influenced spellings of Ukrainian and Russian names is simple: Ukrainians and the Russians use the Cyrillic alphabet, but when their names were rendered in the Roman alphabet, it was often by Polish officials or people fluent in Polish. So the Polish spelling tended to stick. Once in Canada, with the census, and land grants, it appears that many of these families were not asked for their immigration papers or passport, and the name was written as it sounded. Many houses in the early 1900's burnt to the ground with all their personal documents. Many men were labourers on farms, railroads, construction, in the bush, etc. and lost their important documents.