(Hank Jones' Rules for Conducting Genealogy Research are continued from Note Nr. 1628 .)
Hank Jones' 6th Rule. Use Indices with Caution.
How many times have you tried to look up a name such as de Graffenried in an index? I have been trapped more than once among the possibilities of, 1) de Graffenried, 2) deGraffenried, 3) Graffenried, and 4) even von Graffenried. Then there are the possibilities of spelling "Graffenried" differently, but they should be with sight distance of the correct spelling.
What is the record for the most misspellings of a Germanna name? Aylor may get the brass ring. One variation of it, Collier, went undetected for more than two hundred years until Nancy Dodge put her bloodhound onto the trail. Reading some land patents, I came across the names Plunkepee for three men whose first names were Matthew, Paul, and Nicholas. That caught me by surprise because I knew three men by the names of Matthew, Paul, and Nicholas. They were the Blankenbaker immigrants.
H. Jones reports that John P. Dern studied the 1850 Frederick County, Maryland, Census Index and found that 36% of it was in error. That was better than the 1830 Census Index for Maryland, which had a 52% error rate by misspellings or omissions. Both of these instances were compiled by computers, but the problem was garbage in (garbage out). The computer can't clean up the mistakes that we make.
What I usually do is to take my time and read the Index as a story, name by name. I spot some names this way that I probably would never think of looking for. This is especially useful in the land records. Read the Index and make lists of interesting names to investigate.
With the lists of German names we have a special problem. The best thing to do here is to read the name aloud and see if it suggests something. Pay attention to the given names as they may be helpful. This is where a simple knowledge of German phonetics and equivalents may be useful.
(Hank Jones' Rules are continued in the next Note, Nr. 1630.)
(27 Mar 03)
We gratefully acknowledge the work of John Blankenbaker who published over 2,500 Germanna History Notes via the Germanna-L@rootsweb.com email list from 1997 to 2008. We are equally thankful to George Durman (Sgt. George) for hosting the list and republishing the notes via rootsweb.com.