I was combing over genealogy today and I came across the name “Francyne” as being a sister to some great-great-great grandparent of mine. I was struck there for moment… and here I thought that this whole “replace an i with a y” thing came about in the last decade or so… nope! Made me wonder if the motivation for turning a [name]Francine[/name] into a Francyne was the same then as it is now.
Yeah, I’ve seen one of those in my family tree as well! In my case it was [name]Vyvian[/name] - very interesting. I guess parents have been trying to be “different” with the Y’s for quite a while!
Look back on the Social Security baby name lists from the turn of the century - you will find plenty of Y’s in names…[name]Alyce[/name], [name]Katheryne[/name], [name]Bettye[/name], [name]Madelyn[/name], etc. Some parents back then were probably also trying to make a name seem a little different. You will also see y’s in names in much earlier times - before there was standardized spelling. It’s just that it’s gotten out of hand in the past decade or so… I don’t mind a y substitution most of the time… but I hate when the spelling is changed so much you can hardly recognize the name.
You have to keep in mind that the way things are spelled on those old documents were not always the way they were spelled by the people who used them. I’m heavily into genealogy, and my great grandmother [name]Catherine[/name] had her name spelled every conceivable way on documents. If she was an immigrant in the 1800s, she may not have even been able to read or write.
This. They weren’t exactly keen on details back in the day when it came to record keeping. I have an ancestor whose name was [name]Zachary[/name] and we’ve seen several documents where his name was recorded as [name]Zachariah[/name] instead. Also, keep in mind that a lot of people from that time period were illiterate or had very little schooling, so if a person’s name did have a “y” in it, it’s probably because that’s how they actually thought it was spelled, not because their parents were trying to be creative.