Regular readers know that Trautvetter is one of my surnames of interest. While some readers may think the name is a figment of my imagination, it is not. It was my paternal grandmother’s maiden name.
I really thought I had seen every variant of this surname that was out there:
Until today.
Today I discovered Traut Vetter.
One can almost see how it happened in this case. There was no first name entered for the person on the manifest and the initial transcriber decided the first name was “Traut” and the last name was “Vetter.”
I’m not certain it looks like Traut Vetter to me, but then again I’m not reading these manifests day after day until my eyes are buggy.
One more variant to add to the list.
4 Responses
My ancestor’s middle name is “Loven.” For a number of years on various ancestry.com and other trees, I have seen “Dave” as his middle name. There has never been any supporting evidence for this name. It finally dawned on me that someone misread the “L” as a “D”, the “o” as an “a” and dropped (or thought is was just a line) the “n”. Now, I have the task of trying to correct the error. 🙁
I understand completely. I have an aunt in the early 18th century who relatives insisted is named “Pine.” Reasonably certain it is Jane.
The “v” is definitely lower case. There was no excuse for the incorrect transcription.
Yep, just last night found some of my HUBBARD relatives indexed as HALLAND in one US Census.
Nowadays, with the intensive cross-referencing on sites, it wasn’t as hard to determine this.
But, I had a real dickens of a time back in the 90’s deciphering SEXTON indexed (in AIS) as SEATON. To me, that “x” didn’t look anything at all like an “a”, and Soundex wasn’t any help once a consonant was turned into an ignorable vowel. Took a page by page of the county to find them. I was lucky it was a recognizable family group, not just an individual.
I’m sure these won’t be the last we find.