Week 49: Oops (Transcription errors)

 There are a lot of mistakes to be made (and hopefully corrected) in genealogy research!  Now, I am not being a very careful researcher, at least in the sense that I am not usually citing the records that give me the data, but I do generally notice if other people's trees have someone getting married at age 5 or having children before they themselves were born.  That often sends me off on a trail of documents, at which point I find myself being grateful for the careful record keeping of groups like the Dutch Reform Church or even the Quakers.  Civil records have also been very helpful too of course, but it is there that I find the most transcription errors.  Herewith, some examples:

The first one I found was an individual whose name was transcribed (by whom, I am not sure) from the 1910 census entry as "Jane Kettion."  I could find absolutely no one who matched that name and no reason for her to exist either as she was described as a very young daughter of my great-grandmother who at that point had a large family and a husband whose surname was definitely not Kettion.  I finally clicked on the actual census form to see if there was any other information about poor Jane.  I could have saved myself a lot of time if I had just started there because looking at the handwritten form I realized that this was actually Ione Kettion.  There was still some mystery about why she was living in this household on the census date, and where the Kettion name came from,  but Ione was someone I knew about.  She was my father's half sister,  his mother's child by a previous relationship.  Further poking around led me to my grandmother's first husband, Charles Keaton, who was clearly the father of Ione.  Also in that 1910 census Charles claimed to be a widower, even though he must have been all too aware that his wife (ex-wife? did they ever divorce?) was alive and well.  So, not only transcription errors, but also outright lying and Very Bad Spelling.

And, just today, I found a great-great aunt whose name wavered between Lula Case (correct) to Lulu Carl, renaming her parents as Carls too.  I looked at that document online as well, a marriage certificate, and I can see why someone might think that Case was Carl but it's very inconvenient when you are looking for people!

As my own first name is Lee, I am sure that my descendants are going to curse the careless transcribers who are going to think that I'm Lu. I've done my best to keep it straight but I think it might be hopeless.