SHOULTS & PHONETIC EQUIVALENTS name in Scotland

[Ruskie]

Brings to mind a document (which I wish I had kept for future reference) in which a surname was spelled three different ways on the same page. 

As you and others have extensively researched in London and reached a dead end there isn’t the logical conclusion that the family with this a possible variant of a German sounding surname, is likely to lead your search to Europe? Unfortunately, unless there is some indication in your documentation as to their origins prior to living in the SE of England, then this may be as far as you can progress on this line.

Having said that, there are new records coming available online and elsewhere so it can pay to revisit. Might it be worth having another look at the documents you or other family members have collected over the years in case there is mention of, or even any clues, as to where the family originated which may have been missed by whoever did the early research? If you can source original documents all the better. Sometimes transcriptions, even by family members, can miss that one piece of vital information.

Rather than suggesting you abandon a search in Scotland, I was questioning why you were looking for the origins of the family there when all your documentation leads to them being in the SE since the early 1700s, with only one Shoults family living in Scotland in the 1890s/1900s. It has been confirmed by Forfarian that George was born in London and Caroline was born in Ireland. 

Unfortunately, anyone without an Ancestry membership will not be able to view your family tree.

Added: I see you are considering surnames with origins from numerous areas. All the more reason to revisit documentation you have uncovered in the UK in the hope of finding mention of origins.

PS. I think you might find it a bit cheaper to purchase a couple of Scotlands People credits, than to hire a researcher or travel to visit archives yourself. 

[Philomel1910]

Thanks, Ruskie.
When the IGI was freely searchable for the European records, my uncle and I did a lot of trawling of the name and possible variants.
We've discussed every possible avenue of research. We tried searching the non-parochial records. My problem with those was difficulty making out the German script in many of the records. That is one area that I certainly didn't trawl all the way through at Kew. Now I am hundreds of miles away from Kew and must give up any thought of doing more microfilm searching of those non-parochials.
We did look at denization and naturalization records.
The family had a few "tales" which are just that, probably, and of no factual basis whatever. One was that the first Shoults came to these islands with the monarch as part of the royal household. Another, that they were curs. This might have been a grandfather joking that they were dogs, or it might have been that they were from Courland. He did later write to a distantly related Shoults, mentioning that there was some talk of the family coming from Latvia. Latvia, of course, came after Courland (ruled by the Swedes at one time before the Russians beat them in battle). We could only find one Schultz in the National Archives, Kew, who was naturalized in the 1760s (by Act of Parliament) with his wife from Courland. This was a very expensive thing to do. Handel the composer was similarly naturalized by act of parliament. We don't hear anything more about this couple from Courland after that and it may be that somebody in our family had been to the national archives and seen that record and put two and two together.
Just in case there was any truth in the royal household tale, I checked the royal household lists as far back as the records survive. Not a single Shoults or anything like it, except for a Baron Schoultz whose widow received £100 from the Civil List during Queen Ann's reign. There is nothing in our records to make us think there was any connection with this chap!
Thanks for your kind suggestions.

[Philomel1910]

Sorry I should have written Baron Schultz. The spelling we don't want to find in our tree.

[Rosinish]

Baron Schultz. The spelling we don't want to find in our tree.

Why not?

From your initial post...

"I recently found quite a few persons in Scotland with the extremely rare name (in the British Isles) SHOULTS (or phonetic variants - Schoultz, Scholtz, Sholts, etc.) name in Scotland"

I think it seems obvious the name has to be of foreign origin i.e. anglicized.

I think you need to consider the huge difference in accents & how words sounded whether being spoken/heard by someone else as this could make a name completely different in spelling?

I have a scottish surname 'Steel(e) in my family but their accent made it sound like 'Still' & has been recorded as such in the very place that surname was abundant!
I think it's obvious to me, whoever wrote it as 'Still' did not share the same accent or knowledge of the area & names.

"there is a marriage in Scotland that might perhaps lead us to find records in Scotland to fill the gaps. If you're trying to dissuade me from searching for my family in Scotland then you are fighting a lost cause"

No-one was/is suggesting anything to the contrary in your research but trying to help by asking questions relevant in order to try & help you, not hinder or otherwise.

As I stated previously, names morphed/changed within the same families simply because of no 'correct' spellings as Forfarian has pointed out.

Downloading official certs. from scotlandspeople costs very little compared with any other official sites in any country & cannot be accessed anywhere else unless you're lucky to find uploaded images by others on the various family tree sites.

Annie

[Ruskie]

Just popped back with a couple of thoughts (prior to reading Annie's contribution) ....

You said you obtained a lot of information from the IGI some time ago. (It is still freely searchable by the way.) Were they submitted or extracted records that you used to build your tree? Submitted records in particular need checking as they may not be accurate.

I would advise looking again at everything you found on Familysearch and tracking down the originals to view them as they may contain more information than what was transcribed and put online.

It is possible that your surname was originally Schültz but the umlaut was dropped over the decades: for ease of use, because documents such as bmds which included the surname were probably not scrutinised by your family (even if they were literate) to check the spelling was correct, or perhaps the scribe may not have been familiar with spellings of 'foreign' names was not aware of the umlaut, nor would spelling have been as important the further back in history you go.

[Ruskie]

Some of this lot might fit into your tree:
http://www.rootschat.com/links/01nlp/

[Forfarian]

In answer to the statement that there is no incorrect spelling, I beg to differ.

That is your prerogative, and if you choose to think that, you and I will have to disagree. But it may close off some lines of enquiry that might prove fruitful in the longer term.

It wasn't how you thought your name should be spelled, even assuming that you had any idea that spelling was significant. In older records, it was how the clerk writing it down thought it ought to be spelled.

Like Ruskie, I have seen documents in which the same person's name was spelled in several different ways. My own great-grandfather signed his marriage certificate, the birth certificates of eight children and the death certificates of his wife and three children, and managed to spell his own name in seven different ways in the process.

The long and short of it is that there are fewer than half a dozen mentions of the name spelled other than S(c)hultz in Scotland in the 19th century, and none of any spelling in any earlier century. One of those references, the marriage which you think may be significant, was between two people of whom neither was born in Scotland. The references in the census are also to people born in England or 'foreign'. So it is hard to avoid deducing that the name did not arrive in Scotland, from England or elsewhere, until the 19th century.

By all means go to Edinburgh, or hire a researcher. I recommend either course of action. But the cheapest and quickest way to follow up the non-S(c)hultz versions of the name would be to buy £15 worth of credits on the SP web site, which will let you download immediately 10 original documents - more than enough to cover all the 19th century references to the name in spellings other than S(c)hultz.

[Skoosh]

Black's  "Surnames of Scotland!" has zilch for these names!


Skoosh.

[Philomel1910]

Thanks to everybody for the helpful contributions. I am not suggesting that Shoults or any of its variants is a Scottish name. I am pretty sure that the name (if not for many long centuries a rarity but neverthless present) is not from Scotland, England, Ireland or Wales. It's a European (or possibly Russia also) name that was introduced to the British Isles at some point. That point we don't know about. One of the most likely scenarios is that Peter Shoults (or one of the two other Shoults in London parishes before him that we know about) was not born in the British Isles but abroad somewhere, that he came to this country as an alien with or without his parents, and furthermore may not have been naturalized - which was expensive. The tale of the first Shoults coming in with the monarch may have a grain of truth in it although we can't prove it is any more than a tale. The tale that they came from Courland is rather curious because that's not the first country one would think of, since it was ruled by the Swedes. At this point I'll thank the contributor (sorry I can't remember the name) for posting a link to all those interesting Schoults spellings. As you see, some of those are from Sweden (or in Sweden which is of course not the same thing). We don't rule out any spelling. We've turned away some Shoults because they don't fit into the tree anywhere and we think theirs is a copy-cat spelling. All their spouses have decidedly Germanic forenames - Johannes, etc. unlike our family which (apart from one branch that had George Frederick) used names you'd not associate with Germans - Jemmima, Susannah, Absolom, Thomas, John. Peter, by the way, signed himself Petter Shoults on a witness document in the 1780s. Petter is the Scandanavian spelling of Peter. We will add any spellings that will fit into the tree, including any that are not the Shoults spelling. They've got to fit into the tree. We will not manufacture a tree that "might" be right. The certainty factor has to be as high as it can be and that way we hope we've got our tree correct. Speaking of variants - one chap in the land tax assessments for St Paul's Shadwell 1773-1799 that my Uncle Shoults discovered, was spelt phonetically in different ways but they all sounded more or less the same. It is how the name sounds, not so much the spelling of it that is important to us. Schultz with an umlaut is nothing like the sound of our name. Neither is Schultz without an umlaut like the way it is spoken.