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03 February 2015

Faded Letters

Name variants occur for a variety of reasons.

This compiled military service record card for John Rampley was written as Joh Kampleys--the "K" likely was a misreading of an incomplete or faded "R."

Always keep yourself open to a wide variety of spelling variants--even ones you don't see very often.

Having researched this family for decades, this spelling is pretty rare--wrong, but rare.

3 comments:

  1. My mother had the most beautiful handwriting I have ever seen, & very fancy. Sometimes I had to look at her capital letters twice to decide what it was.

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  2. Between faded ink and microfilming, determining the correct name can be very difficult. Also one may not be able to tell if more than one person's writing is on a document.

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  3. Poor indexing was the cause for my ancestors mistaken name, Warman mis read as Harman. If you look at the actual census ,you can see it is a W, not an H .

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