With a "y" or an "i"

 

Those of us who have been researching our family's history for any time have realized how casually spelling has been treated over the centuries. While today's generations may be quite particular about whether everyone spells their given name with a "y" or an "i," clerks in past centuries spelled a surname as they saw fit, not necessarily as the subject of the document preferred.

Thus, when I first began researching my fourth great-grandfather, I discovered that the Georgia record keepers in Glynn County chose to spell his surname as Tyson. That was in 1820, but even the time-faded page made clear that Job's surname was Tyson.

Since then, compiling the few documents I could find on that ancestor revealed that his name might also be spelled Tison, as was shown in records of the long and drawn out settlement of Job's estate. By that point, though, I had already posted articles about my research of this family using the keyword prompted by my first discovery—spelling the surname as Tyson—so that set my path on the blog. But for research? Every step became a double approach, looking for each of two spellings—or inserting the handy wildcard symbol when using search engines which offered that option.

Once having set my mind to being open to such spelling variations, perhaps I chose a more liberal path than I should have followed, for when I finally found a record tying my Job Tison to his supposed roots in Pitt County, North Carolina, I just figured the record for "Joab" Tyson in the 1790 census would simply be one more example of my spelling predicament. I assumed this was someone's best attempt at phonetic spelling of a less common given name.

Having thought this over, once I decided to work on Job's puzzle for this month's Twelve Most Wanted, I realized a possible error. While people today might assume that Joab could be an alternate and phonetic variation on the name Job, its biblical source shows us that those were two different names with different pronunciations. Job, the name of the long-suffering ancient man of the Old Testament, was a name pronounced with a long "o" sound, not a short "o" for the word referring to one's work or career. The name Joab, another biblical name, was actually pronounced with two syllables, Jo - ab.

Yes, I already knew that. I just got caught up in the spelling conundrum and made an assumption. Of course the biblical characters Job and Joab were two separate individuals with different names. But that was then, and now I was working on records from the eighteenth century.

That realization now had me left with not one document at all which could connect Job Tison to North Carolina. Perhaps, I thought, a detour down a different document trail might lead me to a more helpful vantage point for finding Job's origin, whether it was in North Carolina or elsewhere. I decided to take a second look at the friends, associates, and neighbors for my Tison family in Glynn County, Georgia, to see whether any clues could be found to point the way backwards in time for this Tison family.