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16 September 2013

Get Past the Letters

In determining whether a name is the "same" or not, get past the letters and concentrate on the sounds. Whenever I cannot find the last name of Habben, I always look for Hobbin as Habben is usually pronounced in a way that rhymes with "bobbin."

Every name has variant spellings. Every one.


  1. Like one of my surnames, BLUE, spelled many different ways, including BLUE, BLEU, BLAW, BLEW, BALLEU, BALLOW, BALLEW.

  2. A trick I use is to look for the "shape" of a name - letters that extend above or below the base line. Since many of the names I look for are Polish, I rarely find them spelled correctly so the shape of the word tells me how someone else thought the word looked.