Menhinick, not Menhenick

LegacyUser

Jennifer Hatfield said: Jane Derry's married name was Menhinick, not Menhenick. Consequently the rest of the family is incorrect. My mother was a Menhinick and this was her great grandmother.

LegacyUser

Juli said: (1) FamilySearch's Family Tree is an open-edit communal tree. If something is wrong, fix it.

(2) As of this past summer, the names in many indexed historical records on FamilySearch can also be corrected.

(3) Menhinick and Menhenick are just variant spellings of the same name. They're pronounced basically identically, and that's all that matters. The idea that names must be spelled one particular way is entirely a 20th century concept.

LegacyUser

Jeff Wiseman said: Agreed. I have many families that migrated to the US from Europe who eventually changed the way they spelled their names because nobody could understand them. Their original names got spelled phonetically and then continued that way in all other records.

E.g., "Münch" and "Minch" are the same name

I also have families from Germany where after migrating to the US, eventually everyone in the family started using their middle name as their first name and vice-versa.

LegacyUser

Tom Huber said: Yes. Standard spellings of a last name did not become important until a government set a standard that had to be followed -- For instance, in the United States, when the Social Security system was put into place. Prior to that a lot of people were (and some still are) illiterate and unable to read or write or know what those squiggly lines meant.

I have one family whose name is spelled Clark and Clarke. There was no consistency from generation to generation, but eventually Clark won out for all current generations.

Use the spelling on the original documents if there is any question. Do not "modernize" a name just because it is spelled a certain way today. Be prepared to allow both spellings as they are recorded in original documents. I had to do that with the Clarke family.