Our Editorial Policy: How We Handle Old Records, Spelling Errors, and Sources

Why old Michigan records don’t agree on how a name is spelled

Short answer: because nobody was checking a name against an ID card. A township clerk wrote what he heard, a census enumerator wrote what he guessed, and your great-grandfather may have spelled his own name two different ways depending on who was asking.

I’ve pulled the same Bay County family under Anneke, Annecke, and once, thanks to a bad ear on someone’s part, Aneckey. All within the same decade. None of those is “wrong” in the sense of being a clerical crime. It’s just what happens when a name moves from someone’s mouth to someone else’s pen, over and over, for eighty years.

Four patterns show up constantly in Michigan records specifically. Phonetic spelling is the most obvious: clerks wrote names the way they sounded, so Schmidt became Smit or Smith. Informant error is subtler — the person answering a census taker’s questions wasn’t always the person being recorded, and a neighbor’s guess about a family’s age or birthplace made it onto the page as fact. Then there’s Anglicization, which played out slowly across a generation as Polish, German, and Scandinavian settlers in Michigan’s lumber and mining counties adjusted a name’s spelling, sometimes on purpose, sometimes at a clerk’s hand. And transcription drift, which never really stops: original ledger to typed index to online database, each copy is one more chance for a letter to change.

Before you decide a record doesn’t exist, it’s worth ruling these out in order:

• Reread the original, not the index. A typed or OCR’d version has already introduced one more chance for error on top of the original clerk’s.
• Try phonetic and near-miss spellings, not just the version your family uses today.
• Check a second record type for the same year, such as a census entry, a land deed, or a church register, to see whether it agrees with the one you’re doubting.

What we do with a name once we find it written three different ways

We write it down exactly as the record shows it, misspelling, inconsistent capitalization, and all, with a note when a variant is worth flagging. We don’t quietly “fix” a 19th-century clerk’s handwriting to match how a family spells its name today. Doing that erases the exact clue a researcher might need: how the name actually sounded to the person writing it down.

Why we don’t republish other people’s transcriptions

Michigan has a long tradition of volunteer genealogists — people who spent years transcribing cemetery readings, court dockets, and old newspaper columns by hand, often for a single county. That work belongs to the people who did it. Reprinting someone else’s transcription word-for-word, even with credit, isn’t research — it’s copying. So instead of hosting large blocks of transcribed text, we do three things:

1. Explain what a record type is and what it typically contains — so you know what you’re looking for before you go find it.
2. Point to where the actual record lives now. That might be a county clerk’s office, an archive, a library collection, or a specific searchable database, with enough detail to search it yourself.
3. Build original guides on how to search, read, and interpret that record type, based on real research experience, not on copying someone else’s finished list.

If a page here used to be a big list of names (a cemetery roll, a census extract, a marriage index) and it isn’t anymore, this is why. We’d rather tell you honestly where that list lives than pretend we still host it.

How we check facts and date our pages

Every verifiable fact on this site gets checked against a primary source, whether that’s a statute year, a record range, a county formation date, or a fee. We go to state archives, county government pages, legislative records, or the holding institution itself, not another genealogy blog repeating the same unverified number. When sources disagree, we say so rather than picking the more convenient figure. Fees, hours, and office addresses change, so treat any dollar amount or phone number here as worth a quick double-check with the institution before you rely on it.

How to report an error

Found something wrong — a date, a fee, a broken link, a name spelled differently than the source record? Tell us the page, the specific fact, and, if you have one, the source that shows the correct version. We check it against the original record or a primary source before making a change, the same standard we hold our own writing to.

Frequently asked questions

Why does my ancestor’s name appear spelled three different ways? Because three different people wrote it down: a township clerk, a census enumerator, maybe a priest. Each wrote what they heard, not what your family later agreed was correct. Spelling wasn’t standardized the way it is now, especially before 1900.

Does MI Family History correct spelling in the original records it references? No. When we quote or describe a name as it appears on a record, we quote it as written, misspelling and all, and note the variant. Silently correcting an old record destroys the one clue that sometimes matters most — how a name was actually pronounced.

Why don’t you host full transcriptions of cemetery, census, or vital records? Most large transcription projects are the work of individual volunteers or organizations who hold rights to their own compilations. We link to where those records live instead of copying them, and build our own original guides on top.

How do I report an error on this site? Tell us the page URL, the specific fact, and, if you have one, the source that shows the correct information. We check it against the original record or a primary source before changing anything.