Last name changes?

Question:my grandma's maiden name was Deutch, however her dads name was Morris DEUTSCH there was a spelling difference. Morris lived in Wisconsin and moved from hungary (http://search.ancestry.com/cgi-bin/sse.d...
My family oral history supports the idea that the last name was spelt DEUTSCH, but in the record of my mom it says my grandma's last name was Deutch. http://search.ancestry.com/cgi-bin/sse.d...
did she change her last name? why is it spelt differently?????

Best Answer - Chosen by Asker: my grandma's maiden name was Deutch, however her dads name was Morris DEUTSCH there was a spelling difference. Morris lived in Wisconsin and moved from hungary (http://search.ancestry.com/cgi-bin/sse.d...
My family oral history supports the idea that the last name was spelt DEUTSCH, but in the record of my mom it says my grandma's last name was Deutch. http://search.ancestry.com/cgi-bin/sse.d...
did she change her last name? why is it spelt differently?????

Names changed because:

1) The new one was easier to spell.
2) The new one made it easier for people to pronounce it properly.
3) The new one looked more "American".
4) A clerk wrote it one way and the ancestor thought that was how it was supposed to be spelled.
5) None of the above.

Without asking the people involved, you'll never know why.

I have an ancestor who came to the USA as Hendrick Kesselberg. When he died as Henry Casselberry, he had used Kessel, Cassel and Castle; berg, burg, berry and bury.

That's 12 variations. You got off easy.

My friend has a Matthews ancestor who spelled it Mathis, Mathews (one t) and Matthews (two t's) as the mood struck. We have a document in which he uses all three on the same page. Count your blessings!

Ted's answers are great! In addition, I think the clerks often could not understand what the immigrant was saying. Also, I had a Social Studies teacher in Junior High who was named Smith. He said his ancestors immigrated from Germany and changed their name to Smith to avoid persecution.

Makes it difficult sometimes to research genealogy. I lose my great grandmother at Ellis Island. Her last name was Kemp or Kempa...but it was probably something longer in Poland.

http://www.rootsweb.com/~rwguide/lesson8...
I usually type out all my replies.. but this explanation of surnames and spelling is a good one.
The short answer is that spelling is a minor issue in genealogy. What counts is finding a valid record of the person (regardless of how it is spelled).
English teachers might boo and hiss at me. Arguments about right/wrong spelling have nothing to do with finding ancestry. I boo and hiss right back.

Its very possible! case in point my great grandmother's maiden name was Pirtle, but when we meaning my cousin James (bless him for his research) when he started researching our Pirtle's he ran into strange spellings of the name when they came to America and settled in Pennsylvania before moving down to South Carolina, apparently when Michael Purtle came to america he never learned to write his name; copyists transcribed it on documents as he enunciated it for them. He signed with a mark, instead of signing with the usual “X,” his mark looked thus: “B.” His father Jacob Birkle had used this same mark on the "Mary". (ship they came here in)

So the moral of the story is some names will have changed over the years usually because the person could not write or the person transcribing the name didn't know how to spell it or simply just spelled it wrong, My grandmothers name of Schlosser I have often seen in early document spelled sometimes as Slusser or Schlusser

The further into history you get, the less uniform spelling are. Firstly, many names were spelled phonetically (how they sounded), so they varied considerably according to the individual/clerk taking records. Once you get into the 19thC, there's no guarantee your ancestors could read & write, so registrars & census enumerators used their best judgement about spelling.

Additionally, anything German sounding was likely to undergo some changes around the wars in countries allied to Britain, as people wanted to avoid being considered German (this applied to all the Germanic regions of Europe, as ordinary folk didn't distringuish between German and Dutch, Scandinavian names etc). One of my family names of Clausen (Danish) was changed to Clawson c1914.