52 Ancestors Challenge - Week 15 - How do you spell that?

 

How do you spell that?  This phrase has an almost daily occurrence for us, especially so when you speak to anyone on the telephone. 

Although spelt as it is said, our surname of Tunesi can flummox some people.  Pronounced ‘Chew-nasey’, our surname is of Italian origin although my husband’s family have been in England since the 1860s.   Just about everyone with this surname in the UK is descended from Felippo Tunesi who came from the Como region of Italy and first appears in the UK 1861 census.  His brother Carlo too, but he did not settle in the UK but went further afield to the USA.  We have a One-Name study for this surname registered with the Guild of One-Name Studies - https://one-name.org, with occurrences found in Argentina, Switzerland, France as well as Italy and the UK as well as other English-speaking countries. 

With my own maiden name of Nickels, we have a similar problem.  An unusual spelling of a common surname, it has had many incarnations over the centuries.

Spelling of names was a bit hit-and-miss earlier that the mid to late nineteenth century.  Often a name was ‘spelt as it was spoke’.  Therefore, for example, if your ancestor moved from a rural area where there would have been a local accent, to a metropolitan area like London, the parish clerk would have written the name down as he heard it, accent, and all.  Top tip – if you can’t find your ancestor in a census try saying out loud the surname with the local accent to see if you can come upon an alternative phonetic spelling that might bear fruit. 

But, back to my Nickels’.  The family originated in Suffolk, in the eastern part of the UK.  A region which still has a distinct accent, especially in rural areas.  I’ve been researching my Nickels family, and many others of the same name in the county since the 1980s and have a trusty old fashioned card index for the entries from GRO BMD indices, parish registers, subsidy rolls, wills, monumental inscriptions, and other documentary sources. 

As you can imagine there have been many different spellings of the Nickels surname over the centuries. 

There’s Niccols, Nichells, Nicholas, Nichol, Nichole, Nicoll, Nicolle, Nicols, Nicolls, Nichell, Nicholl, Nicholds, Nicholz,  Nicholes, Nichols, Nicholls, Nickalls, Nickels, Nickhols, Nickholds, Nickols, Nickolls,  Nickoulds, Nicols, Nycholle, Nycolls

On one memorable occasion my dad even had a letter addressed to him as ‘Mr A. Nickers’.  A good laugh was had by all.

There are also several spellings of Moules (Mole, Moles) and Dominy (Dominie, Dominey) and my husband’s Whenmouth’s (Wenmouth, Wenmoth). 

Don’t be tied up with a particular spelling of your surname.  As you go back further in time with your family history research spelling becomes phonetic and at the whim of the clerk who was filling in the baptism, marriage, burial or will.  On occasion there is a difference in the spelling of a surname within the same document.