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Mehitabbel Mehittaball Mehetabell Mehitable Mehitabel [21 March 2017]
Let's see. In the Middletown VR, her name is "Mehitabbel" in the birth record and "Mehittaball" in the marriage and death records. The abstract of her father's probate calls her "Mehetabell". The Hubbard genealogy and Cutter (a tertiary source at best) call her "Mehitable". Memoranda Relating to the Ancestry and Family of Sophia Fidelia Hall calls her "Mehitabel". Which source should have priority?
Jacobus (FANH 767-68) says, "The Spelling in vital records is not conclusive, since it may have been the error of an ignorant clerk. The spelling
on gravestones is not conclusive, for stone-cutters made many mistakes. Even an autograph is not conclusive, for sometimes a man spelled his name
differently in different signatures. … We have standardized the spelling of all names. We do not claim that the form we have adopted is the only correct way, but we do claim that it is as correct as any other way. Generally speaking, we have tried to adopt the form which was most often used in the early generations; where this was uncertain, we adopted the shorter form. It takes less labor and space to write Curtis than to write Curtiss; and we do not believe anyone will be in doubt as to what family is intended. But if you prefer the longer form, by all means spell it so. Only, do not write and tell us what a frightful blunder we have committed in decapitating that superfluous 's'. We admit our blunder in advance."
He used "Mehitabel" to standardize a wide variety of spellings. Seems as good a choice as any to me.--jaques1724 05:01, 21 March 2017 (UTC)
- No source has authority. No colonial spelling is authoritative. Any choice is arbitrary so the change is gratuitous and unnecessary. No other change was made during the edit, there was nothing done but to make this change to one person's preference. Why make it? A reader will understand either way. wikipedia:Mehitable while wikipedia:Mehitabel is redirected to Mehitable. --Jrich 05:28, 21 March 2017 (UTC)
- This has of course been discussed ad naseum between us, and between others. You cite Jacobus, but how universal is he? Should we use him for just this name, or for all names? Can we find just one example of his spelling, or do we have to read every work he has, giving precedence to more recent works over his older work? Or is there a single page where he lists his choices of spellings? Does he take precedence over how Robert Charles Anderson spells things? Or is the choice of Jacobus as authority perhaps an arbitrary choice of one user? His work is decades old. Aren't websites like google and wikipedia and baby-naming sites more likely to reflect "most commonly accepted", at least among the WeRelate user population contributing today? I could count the number of various spellings already in use at WeRelate (989 vs. 316, in my favor), but that gives excessive weight to the early GEDCOM dump-and-run contributors. Historically the Biblical spelling would seem to be the most correct, but that seems to be one of the least common spellings, so it doesn't appear to be the "most commonly accepted".
- It might be useful if there were name groups, like you see with surnames in Savage or Barbour, where the name displays on WeRelate pages as "Mehitable, Mehitabel, Mehetabel, etc." but it doesn't. WeRelate does do a fairly good job of dealing with spelling differences as long as the name is in a name field and not a keyword field. Perhaps a software change could collect statistics on searching, and keep a page showing how often users search for Mehitable versus Mehitabel, so users have a list they can refer to when they want to know the "most commonly accepted" spelling. Then they can know that they are entering the one that will be useful to the greatest number. Perhaps you can galvanize the Overview Committee to decide on the "most commonly accepted" spelling of each possible name and publish the list. Until something like that happens, I don't see that there is an objectively right answer.
- Say we agree to disagree. If you go around changing Mehitable to Mehitabel and I go around changing Mehitabel to Mehitable, both for reasons having some justification, how does that help this website? Multiply that by all the possible spellings that at least one user might want to champion. When you make a change like this, with no objective way of defining what is correct, a person who disagrees is left with no response but an edit war. And such a user could forgo responding, to avoid an edit war, but then the result is very asymmetric and unbalanced, i.e., the last edit always "wins", which I can vouch, gets old. This is a co-llaborative website and I believe it is necessary to co-exist with things that aren't done the way we like, if it is not wrong or misleading. To be entirely clear, I am not objecting to Mehitabel per se, I am objecting to your changing the spelling, for no compelling reason apparently other than it is the spelling you, one user, chooses to use. (And not only changing the spelling but renaming the page and the family pages, propagating through the family, to all the children, etc. Perhaps you could bring yourself to simply add it as an alternate name?) --Jrich 15:23, 21 March 2017 (UTC)
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