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The spelling of names is wildly inconsistent in historical documentation. This is primarily because our 18th and 19th century ancestors lived in a culture with less literacy, and in an age when printing was so hard or so expensive that individuals might have gone years without seeing their names in print. The agencies that we would like to consider official sources—church records, census returns, etc—offer no help. Again, when the written word was less common, its accuracy had less importance. The Golden Book of the Minorcans, for instance, dealt with a fairly finite group of family names, yet the spelling of those names varies from one entry to another, even on the same page. The census, which was taken by an interview process, has an astonishing rate of error—not only spelling the names, but the names themselves. One must remember that the purpose of the census was to count heads, not to label them (the early census didn't even use house numbers, just family units). Gravestones are formal records that every generation took seriously, and provide the most reliable source. But they are not perfect. For one, inscriptions were dependent on the veracity and literacy of the survivors. Gravestones might have been used as an opportunity to permanently revise a historical inconvenience (an illegitimacy, for instance) or perpetuate family folk lore. In a less literate society, inscriptions were undoubtedly left to clergymen—qualified scribes, but also the same men who managed birth and marriage records with little consistency. I personally maintain original source spellings in all of my research notes, but the high rate of variation makes the telling of a narrative with those names confusing. For this genealogy, therefore, I am using one spelling of every name across generations. In some cases, I have confidence that this it not the way the individual spelled the name in her/his lifetime, but I think it serves my purpose, which is clarity. I am using the "-y" version for all the Italian families (Bonelly, Leonardy, Pacetty) that came to New Smyrna in 1768. This form was very common in hand-written documents in Saint Augustine's early history, but far less popular in the 20th century. Most present day Italian descendants use "-i" (Leonardi, Pacetti) and our family members had begun to make that transition as well. Finally, women in this genealogy retain their birth names throughout. This choice is admittedly a feminist impulse—women should be allowed to retain their identities in marriage, especially in eras when the law prevented them from retaining ownership of property or the dignity of a vote. But mostly, using consistent names here is another gesture toward clarity, as a reader skipping from page-to-page could easily miss when a marriage happened and a last name changed. |