One of the advantages of having an unusual name to research is that one generally is aware of all the families with that last name. 
The problem is that when one finds a person with that unusual last name the desire is to determine how they fit into the families with which one is already familiar. Such was the case with “Fentje Ufkes” who appears in the “Evangelical Lutheran Church of America, Records, 1875-1940” at Ancestry.com. The location was wrong. There were only two known Ufkes families in the United States in 1900. One in Minnesota and one in Hancock and Adams Counties in Illinois. That’s it. And while Peoria is reasonably close to Hancock and Adams Counties, this Ufkes was simply too old. Who was she?

 

Turns out she wasn’t an Ufkes after all.

A careful reading of the funeral register from which the Ancestry.com index entry was made indicated that Ufkes was not even her last name. The name was actually Siefkes.

The pastor of the St. Paul Lutheran Church in Peoria, Illinois, apparently could not decide how to make the letter “S” as shown in the illustration accompanying this post. In three of words sampled, he made his uppercase “S” one way. In the name Sophie, he made it another. No matter what, it’s pretty clear that the last name of the Fentje who was born on 13 September 1811 was not Ufkes. 

This is one of those rare times when someone read a last name as Ufkes when it was not.  Usually it’s the other way around.

This is an excellent reminder about searching based upon first name only. Siefkes and Ufkes are not variant spellings of each other.

And despite the unusual nature of the last name, the Ufkes family who settled in Hancock and Adams County, Illinois, in the 1870s is not related to the Ufkes family who settled in Minnesota shortly after that.

But that’s the topic of another post.