A reader wrote in recently asking if the Saylors spelled their name differently years ago. When searching in early records, names can sometimes pose quite a problem. Are the Sailors the same as the Saylors? Are the Salyers just a misspelling of Saylor? In the 20th century, we fill out all sorts of forms ourselves and it is important to be exact about the spelling of our names so our various records can be matched up properly. In the past, people weren't so fussy about spelling of any kind. Many people could not read and write and even those that did were accustomed to letting the clerks write things out when it came to marriage records, deeds, and so forth. The clerks tended to spell names as they heard them. Often, at a later date, the record was recopied by a different clerk and other changes would occur in a name.

To return to the family inquired about, whether it is spelled Sailor or Saylor or yet other variations it is the same family. But, it is not the same as Salyer. The Salyer and Saylor families were two separate families. They were related as Solomon Saylor had married Sarah Salyer. Both families moved here as a group. More information on the Saylor family is presented in Heritage IV, which comes out this Saturday in the Harlan Daily Enterprise. It must be noted that the two families with names so similar have been confused in the records for a Saylor record and do not find it, you should check in the Salyer records as an error might have occurred in the original document or a later recopying. This can be especially true of census records. The census takers who went around the county taking note of everyone who lived in each household were sometimes very poor spellers and incredibly sloppy in their recording of families. These original lists were then recopied and more errors could occur.

If you still cannot locate someone in a time and place you feel certain they should be, try imagining alternate spellings by sound, allowing for careless clerks. Osborn can come out Osburn, Ausborn, etc. Then try scribbling the name in those various spellings and see what other names it might look like. In older styles of handwriting some letters could be easily confused such as S for J; L for F; A for O and so on. Capital M's, H's and W's could be easily misread. One would think it hard to confuse the names David and Daniel but the two are very difficult to distinguish in 19th century handwriting. In addition to the Saylor/Salyer confusion mentioned above, other names in this area sometimes confused are Helton with Melton, Lee with Fee, Step with Estep, Aaron with Amon, and Joseph, Josiah and Joshua.

Another thing to remember is that some Christian names `come in pairs,' usually famous names such as George Washington, Andrew Jackson, Benjamin Franklin and so on. If you have an ancestor known as Wash but cannot locate a record, try looking for George; Frank might be found as Benjamin; Matt might turn up as James (Matt for Madison). Most of us are aware of the standard nicknames such as Betsey or Lizzie for Elizabeth but there are three 19th century nicknames that deserve special mention: Polly for Mary, Patsy for Martha and Kiah for Hezekiah. One more small point while on the subject of names: currently, Sr. and Jr. indicate father and son but, in the 19th century and earlier, this indicated only which of two people with the same name in an area was the older and which the younger. They might even have been totally unrelated.