Spelling of Douglas and Drysdale family names - variants

[Ronald Drysdale]

Hi all, 

As many of you will have discovered when researching historical ancestors electronically, oftentimes important records are missed because the surname is spelt in a slightly different way, indexes located within the publications themselves (when available) help to mitigate this problem but still some records are missed.

In some older printed works, the letter 'f' is sometimes used instead of the letter 's' & this obviously impacts electronic search results when looking for (say) Drysdale [Dryfdale] or Douglass [Douglaff].

Wild card searches using *** and similar (when available) can bypass these problems but not all websites and document types support this facility.

Commonly found variants for Drysdale - Drysdall, Drysdell, Drysdill, Drisdale, Drisdall, Drisdell, Drisdill, Driesel, Driessel, Drischel, Drissel, Dresdall etc etc.

Douglas, although being a much better known name, also 'suffers' from variations in historical records:

https://www.douglashistory.co.uk/history/articles/surname.html

The reasons for these variations may be many and diverse, but I think one of the most common reasons is that for older records, including Parish registers, Court registers, Wills etc. etc. the name of the person of note would be advised verbally to the church official, notary or recorder by people who could not read or write, possibly with a strong countryside or regional accent, and it would then be up to the local official to spell and write down what he thought he had heard as best he could.

Other variations also arise when hand written documents are re-copied or transcribed.

Anyway, the reason for this post was not to educate Douglas Archives people who are already very well aware of these matters but to act as an introduction for a document I recently came across in early American colonial records which is a good example of 'variants':

In one publication - BRIEF ABSTRACT of Lower Norfolk County and Norfolk County Wills 1637-1710 - the following variations for Drysdale are all found within 3 small paragraphs - no two entries are the same:

Robert Drisedayle
Robert Driesdayell
Robert Dayeslayed
Robert Dresedasle
Robert Dryesdayell
Robert Drisdrall

Without the book's end index, an electronic search for this person would obviously have come up with 'nothing found'

Best regards