Advice on surname variations please.

[Gadget]

Also, what was written on the gravestone was what was told to the mason who then wrote it down as he thought it was - or even got it wrong.

I have an example of my 3x grandmother having  the numbers in her age transposed(86 rather than 68) , which made her in her 60s when her last child was born.

As GG says, you have to accept it. Hambling and Hamblin are very close and, allowing for accents, are fairly easy to misinterpret.

Gadget

[oldhippy]

I would say as far back as I have got would be the correct spelling being Hambling my late Grandfather was a Hambling. As I said I can except spelling mistakes in documents but why should it be different on a gravestone, I'm sure the ones that were still alive would have told whoever did the gravestone what the surname was and how you spell.   

[iluleah]

Until people learned to read/write other people who could read/write wrote documents ( so the vicar, parish clerk, the banker, the legal officer, the tax man, all those people who had learned to read/write) including their names and wrote it down how is sounded to them... so depends on their accent, depends on  how they heard it and phonically spelt it which is why  you get several variants of the same name even the same person on different records...so back then, unlike now no one was precious about spellings of their name
If you look on marriage certificates you will see an X as 'their mark' so they didn't read/write, if you look at the census you will see 'can't read/write' and so the people didn't know what their name looked like written down, how it was spelt so couldn't even if they wanted to 'correct it' and many later on would just copy how they saw it was written by someone else...so maybe different to how their paent or sibling wrote their name

Spelling didn't become important until the mid 20th century and then because the education system put lots of effort into teaching reading and writing to all, and with all in compulsory education to achieve this.

So names or the spelling of names when researching are not so important, it is finding the primary 'connecting' record to prove parent to child or wife to husband

[aghadowey]

I would say as far back as I have got would be the correct spelling being Hambling my late Grandfather was a Hambling. As I said I can except spelling mistakes in documents but why should it be different on a gravestone, I'm sure the ones that were still alive would have told whoever did the gravestone what the surname was and how you spell.   

There is no 'correct' spelling of your surname. What you are finding are different variations of the same surname which is common. I've see legal documents even up to early 1900s where different spellings are used for same person (and person even signed their own name in the document using 2 different spellings).

[brooksburns]

We have to put ourselves in the minds of people who just didn't care very much how things are spelt, because writing was not a big part of their lives.

We read every day, and our place in society is defined by precise spelling of our name which determines our rights to our money, property, identity, etc.  That makes us care a lot about it and we can't imagine how we'd function without that system.

But maybe we are the anomaly.  Our ancestors did important things via speaking and collective memory, and if things were written down then that was in many ways just an aide-memoire.  And even once the authorities started caring about precise documentation as a way of managing society - an ordinary person wouldn't necessarily be on board with that newfangled, unnecessary, complicated, etc etc.... stuff.  It took a few generations for the culture to shift to where we are today.

[oldhippy]

Let me get this right. Even with different spelling of the surname the family are the same.

[KGarrad]

Let me get this right. Even with different spelling of the surname the family are the same.

Correct

[decor]

Let me get this right. Even with different spelling of the surname the family are the same.

The concept of correct spelling or misspelling is a relatively recent phenomenon. Nowadays, we have a heavily engrained sense of "correct spelling" drilled into us from our own education amongst other things, but in the past there wasn't necessarily such a thing as a misspelled word or name. We're talking about societies predominantly using oral communication where "the masses" couldn't read or write (well).

[brooksburns]

Let me get this right. Even with different spelling of the surname the family are the same.

Yes.

I have an ancestor whose surname was spelled Aldcorn or Alcorn.  Some of his children used the name Alcorn for themselves and their own descendants, but one used Alcoran and so that whole branch of my distant cousins is called Alcoran.  Even in the Alcorn branch, it appears as Alcorne later as a child's middle name.  They were fine with that.  Maybe they just liked the look of vowels, who knows.