Spelling of name [16 November 2017]
Henry being a deacon would have been able to write. I looked up the last 6 deeds where Henry sold land prior to death and all six showed Henry signature as Henry Prentice (no "his mark" on any of them). Of course the problem is that deeds are recorded, i.e., copied by a clerk. So perhaps you could argue that clerks simply refused to spell his name the way he did? I looked up Henry's will [1]. Clearly written by somebody else, so perhaps the use of Prentice in the will didn't reflect his wishes, but the signature says "Henry Prentice" and it is clearly not the handwriting of the person who wrote the rest of the will. You can't pick any single record and assume your spelling is correct... --Jrich 22:07, 16 November 2017 (UTC)
Was based on his son's (Joshua) and family's use of "Prentiss". It will change. [16:39, 16 November 2017 Neal Gardner]
- His (Henry's) death record and his gravestone both say Prentiss. Probably, I would assume, because Joshua was the "informant" for both. So there are grounds for saying Prentiss. The problem here was not that the page said Prentiss, but that the perfectly good spelling that was there before was changed. It should simply not be viewed as a significant difference. I think the best answer is how a man signed his name, but I have seen cases where the person spelled his own name differently at different points in his life. And no researcher is aware of all sources, even those that do an "exhaustive search", so undoubtedly somebody is eventually going to enter a spelling that not everybody agrees with. Some descendants may belong to a branch that currently uses Prentiss, some descendants may belong to a branch that use Prentice, yet they are provably both descendants of the same man. Few names maintain a continuity of spelling. What to do? Decide if it communicates the essence of the name, or if it is so wrong that it is misleading. My sense is that the spirit of collaboration says, only change the latter case. (Since you participated, I will add that my earlier complaint to another user about Elizor vs. Eleazer was an attempt, not to change a spelling - which you will notice I did not do - but to head off a practice that I thought would lead to oddball spellings, causing such disagreements to be a more frequent problem.) --Jrich 03:52, 17 November 2017 (UTC)
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