Re: Stepp Family
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In reply to:
Re: Stepp Family
9/27/01
Hoping to clarify some things and to add a better understanding of misspelled names.And to say this is sad to say the Mormons butchered names.If you look around, in every record you find, surnames were misspelled.Not just with the Mormons, but in state records, births, deaths, marriages and census records. In state records, you will find names were also abbreviated or just initials used. I find this so all the time.In a Revolutionary pension record, my ancestors surname was spelled four different ways...and this surname in records has about six different spellings, all because many were illiterate and couldn't spell their own names...and so it was up to the person writing down the record to interpret the name by the way that person pronounced it.
Many of these different spellings came about besides those being illiterate, but by peoples accents.The person taking down the information had to write it down as to how it sounded to them.There was nothing to back up a persons name as we do now with Social Security.Way back then, here in America, the English language wasn't like we know it today. We had many different nationalities coming here from many differant countries, all learning the English language with these foreign languages and their accents.Listen to someone who is French or German or Irish...the way they pronounce names. Unless you knew who they were speaking of, you may not even know what the name they were saying let alone try and spell it.
I've been doing genealogy for some 27 years and have researched many records and have seen all this in all the records I've mentioned.The Governments records originally consist of much more records than those of the Mormon church.The Mormons only kept records of their own people.Years ago, The LDS church went through all the court houses (with permission of the courts) copying all their records.The records you find now in the Mormon churches are copies as they appeared in the original records, with their misspellings, initials and abbreviated names.
Thanks, Billie Miller (female)
I descend from William Sims and Agatha Stepp.Trying to find Agatha's parents.