In the last mad dash to send Beads in the Necklace to print, we had to make sure that the names in the stories were right. Genealogists struggle with the difficulties of names every day.

There was the question of those pesky hyphens. In French Canada, hyphenated names are common. But not every double name takes a hyphen. Then what about apostrophes that were simply dropped?

And accents. Some French names had accents and others not. There seemed to be no rhyme or reason.

Some of the people in our stories had unusual names. Hermonie? Maybe it was Harmonie? Or even Hermionie? It was Herminie. And is it Catherine or Catharine? Or Isabelle or Isabella?

And how many ways can you spell Jodouin? Each source document seemed to have a different spelling.

And then what about place names. Do we use the French place name or the anglicized place name? With or without accents?

All these variations in the names made me think of my husband’s surname. I asked him, “Why do some people in your family spell their name Delatolas as Dellatolas, with two letter ls?

He shrugged, “I dropped an “l” when I emigrated to Canada.”

“Besides, my father and my brother had already dropped an “l”. Anyway, who cares?”

“Well,” I muttered, “Genealogists care.”