Week 15 2022: How do you spell that? #52Ancestors

As a member of the Johnson County Genealogical Society, I’ve just started volunteering every Friday at the Johnson County (Kansas) Central Resource Library working the genealogy desk. Given my afternoon time-slot it’s a pretty quiet assignment with just a few regulars. In a discussion with a new researcher, I reminded them that they need to (almost) completely ignore the spelling of their family name when researching the records. Even with a simple name such as “Baty,” I can easily come up with a dozen or so ways I’ve seen it spelled. “But it will be impossible to search those different spellings,” is a frequent lament. Not to despair: “wild-cards are your friends.”

For those of you that aren’t familiar with this term, a “wild card” (many times an *) can be used in place of one or more letters in a name allowing you to quickly search for various different spellings in one fell-swoop which may provide even more information than if you had laboriously plugged in each variation one-by-one. I wrote about using this strategy back in 2020 when I researched my Glaeschen family in Wernersberg .

My second great-grandparents came to the U.S. under the name “Glaeschen.” The records I found for the family in Wernersberg spelled the name “Glaesgen.” My German friend Horst explained that in the German language both names would likely be pronounced the same. The available church records for Wernersberg go back to 1688 and the spelling of the name (with the '“g”) remained pretty consistent, however many of the earliest records spelled the name “Claesgen.” Again, this appears to be a matter of pronunciation versus an actual spelling change.

During my research into Wernersberg, I found an article about the history of the village written by a Willy Achtermann.[1] His research shows that Peter, Jacob, and Hans “Clössigen” lived in Wernersberg in 1634. Some online family trees connect these men with my Glaeschen family, which seems likely, although much more research needs to be done to prove it.

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[1] Willy Achtermann, “On the history of the village of Wernerberg,” (date and publisher unknown); digital image, https://docplayer-org.translate.goog/36308066-Zur-geschichte-des-dorfes-wernersberg.html?_x_tr_sl=de&_x_tr_tl=en&_x_tr_hl=en&_x_tr_pto=sc : accessed 11 May 2022.