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16 September 2013

Get Past the Letters

In determining whether a name is the "same" or not, get past the letters and concentrate on the sounds. Whenever I cannot find the last name of Habben, I always look for Hobbin as Habben is usually pronounced in a way that rhymes with "bobbin."

Every name has variant spellings. Every one.

2 comments:

  1. Like one of my surnames, BLUE, spelled many different ways, including BLUE, BLEU, BLAW, BLEW, BALLEU, BALLOW, BALLEW.

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  2. A trick I use is to look for the "shape" of a name - letters that extend above or below the base line. Since many of the names I look for are Polish, I rarely find them spelled correctly so the shape of the word tells me how someone else thought the word looked.

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