What's in a name?

When I first started my family history, I only looked at Dickins entries on parish registers and in indexes. Dickins was the name on the birth certificate I had for my three greats grandfather, so none of those other names - Diccon, Dyckins, Dicken, Dyckens, Dicones, Dycons - would be anything to do with me right? Wrong! While it is fairly unusual for names to change a lot in the 20th and 21st century any family history researcher who has looked at records over a couple of hundred years will know that often the names will change several times in the course of 100 years. Often the spelling of the name was at the whim of the registrar -- usually the vicar or curate for a parish.

If you have come to a full stop on a particular name, start looking for variations. In one newspaper report of 1780, William Dickins was reported as William Diggens, and that may well have happened often. For those that were literate a change in spelling for one event might not mean a wholesale change forever - but for those who signed the register books with an x, they might well get stuck with a new spelling for their name.

Back to Shakespeare's time, people just didn't get het up over different spellings for the same word - he spelled his own name half a dozen different ways in the course of his life. What mattered was that people understood who you were and what you were saying, the spelling wasn't important.