New Post
Search
Help[Facts] Anglicizations of Welsh names
In doing some family history research, I found that my great-x6 grandparents were named Shon and Shan (ha). Which I'm assuming are Anglicizations of Siôn and Siân? Have the spellings Shon and Shan ever really been used? I wonder if it's more likely their names were actually spelled in Welsh?
The source I found this in was an online quotation from a newspaper in the late 1800s, talking about the history of the area in the early 1800s. So I'm not entirely sure how accurate the text is. They would've been born in the mid-late 1700s.
The source I found this in was an online quotation from a newspaper in the late 1800s, talking about the history of the area in the early 1800s. So I'm not entirely sure how accurate the text is. They would've been born in the mid-late 1700s.
1
Replies
>Have the spellings Shon and Shan ever really been used?
They have, and they still are, even in Wales. Unless your relatives were very well-educated, literate people, the spelling of their names would have been entirely down to whoever was writing about them, at that point in time; name spelling wasn't standardised. In a newspaper from England or a non-Welsh-speaking area of Wales, journalists would almost certainly have transcribed the names by sound.
They have, and they still are, even in Wales. Unless your relatives were very well-educated, literate people, the spelling of their names would have been entirely down to whoever was writing about them, at that point in time; name spelling wasn't standardised. In a newspaper from England or a non-Welsh-speaking area of Wales, journalists would almost certainly have transcribed the names by sound.
1
Thanks, I wondered if it was something like that. The newspaper was the Cambrian News... which looks to be an English-language newspaper? So that could definitely be why, I didn't even think to check that!
This message was edited 5/20/2011, 3:40 AM
1