Odd spelling

[Gordon163]

Hi,

I have seen several entries in Old Cornish registers with the forename 'Jone'.

Does anyone know if this is 'John' or 'Joan' please?

Thanks,

Gordon

[osprey]

normally Joan, might be Jane. Spelling was less regular. You may come across the a surname spelt in different ways by the same person within the same record. There's little point in worrying about what we now think of as the 'correct' spelling.

 

[Gordon163]

I have Scots relatives, too, and Joan and Jane are often interchangeable there.

Thanks,

Gordon   

[KGarrad]

One of the most popular feminine names in the Isle of Man was "Joney".

Extract from W.W.Gill A Third Manx Scrapbook — dating from 1928 but not published until much later.

Joney, f.; rarely Juney; once as Johna (see above). Talbot's Manorial Roll contains no Joney, pace P. M. C. Kermode (Kirk Michael, page 30), who says it is often met with in the Roll. Formerly the commonest of Mx fem. names, but now demoded.

(as mentioned in ManxNoteBook, Frances Coakley)

[Gordon163]

Thanks.

I suspect that Jone = Joan as I saw a marriage between John and Jone.

Gordon

[Kiltpin]

Spelling is an Adventure, not a Science! 

Regards 

Chas

[ThrelfallYorky]

A "Jane" of mine became "Jean", another one Jeanne, another Joanna!

[Andrew Tarr]

Spelling was less regular. You may come across the a surname spelt in different ways by the same person within the same record. 

In the 18th-C only the 'educated' could read and write, and any records you can look at now were written by clerics or lawyers.  Those people helped to regularise spellings, and if they heard a new name they wrote it by analogy with like-sounding familiar words.  The owners of the names would probably have been unable to detect any differences.  Many forenames were biblical and had been standardised by the printed word.

Education advanced during the 19th-C and the owners of surnames (especially) gradually became attached to whatever variant they had been given.

[susieroe]

Thanks.

I suspect that Jone = Joan as I saw a marriage between John and Jone.

Gordon

That reminds me of an incident years ago. I'd noticed lots of 'John and Jane Keat' entries for a village in Cornwall in an index in Leicester library.
Later, on holiday in Cornwall, we were visiting a little village and naturally I had to look round the graveyard. There was a headstone, at which I exclaimed "Oh, it's John and Jane!". A voice behind us said " Ah, you knew the family?"...it was the Vicar (looking pleased to meet a descendant of his late worshippers). Awkward, trying to explain what we were doing in a random churchyard, getting over-excited by random names of people who were nothing to do with my family.