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2024 Week 9 : Changing names

So far in all my years of research I have not come across any ancestors who deliberately changed their names to take on a new identity for one reason or another, though I have come across various spelling changes down through families or poor transcription of official records.

However, my husband Martin's 2 x great grandmother is someone whose maiden name appeared in different guises in both her own documentation and that of her children and it was only through collaboration with a DNA match to one of my husbands siblings that we discovered her 'real' maiden name and information that enabled us to get back another two generations.

Initially we had her name from her daughter Elizabeth Raycroft's birth certificate - Mary McAllan.


Her  own marriage certificate gave her name as Mary McCallum.


 Her death certificate gave her father as Thomas Mulholland.


Although these names seem very different, the way they would be have been said is important, as different accents can make the same name sound very different. From census details both in Scotland, where she lived most of her adult life, and from a US census, where she died, we knew she was born in Ireland, so she very likely retained an Irish accent. Her name varied on various documents pertaining to her children. The dates on these documents, as well as copious research, proved  there was no 'second wife' or anything of that nature. Mary Ann McAllan/McCallum/Mulholland were one and the same person.

So I went looking for her birth in Ireland - not an easy thing to do for the early 19th century unless you know which part of Ireland you are looking in and certainly not made easier by all the various name permutations. Her mother's name was given as Jane Malone on her death certificate, but mother's maiden name is very often not given on Irish Parish records at that time. Transcription errors on Ancestry's 1851 Scotland census gave her birthplace as Snowana - the actual record from Scotlands People showed this to be Fermana (Fermanagh).

Then a few years ago, I was contacted by someone on Ancestry who was a DNA match to Martin. He was a descendant of a Thomas McHollon and a Jane Malone. Indeed he proved to be a descendant through Mary Ann's brother, Peter. Since then I have found another descendant of Peter who is a match to Martin and two who are descendants of Mary Ann's sister Jane. Martin's late sister Maria seems to have fifteen DNA matches on Ancestry who are descendants of her siblings.

So there we have it. Name changes do happen in families for different reasons - adoption, changing your surname to fit in with a new country, to start a new life, changes in spelling down the years or in Mary Ann's case, maybe just to the way it was spoken and recorded.

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