Our ancestors didn't make it easy for us!

I spent many years wondering what happened to Grace Cross, my 1st cousin 5x removed. Then I found that someone using the LDS site (FamilySearch) believed she had married a man who subsequently used a different surname. Following numerous paths through the family I am convinced that Leonard Crawshaw. who married in Accrington in 1816 is the same person as Leonard Hacking, who appears in Censuses with that name. When Grace died her death was registered as Grace Hacking. When Leonard died a few years later he was registered as Leonard Crawshaw. Some of their children went by the name of Crawshaw, others used Hacking. One of Leonard's & Grace's daughters used the name Hacking when she married and when she registered the births of her first 3 children, but reverted to giving her maiden name as Crawshaw when her subsequent 3 were registered.

Research continues to track down all the descendants of my cousin Grace but in the meantime I am struggling to know what to record as "Surname" and what to record as "AKA" for the ones I have found, and also how to refer to them in my Notes. etc.

This is the second relative of mine who caused me problems by not sticking with the surname they were born with. The other was my 3rd Great Grandfather who was Joseph Pitt when he was baptised in Canterbury in 1799 and when he was recorded in th 1841 Census, but he was Joseph Dinnage when he married in 1822 and when the first 9 of his 12 children were born/baptised. In fact, the 10th child's birth was registered with the surname Dinnage but he and his parents were surnamed Pitt when he was baptised later the same year!

 

As you have found, this is not so uncommon. Women may have a choice of married or maiden surnames, but for men I can think of two situations that would arise often enough, though there are others.

One is being given one name and then a stepfather's name, and later on rebelling against this stepfather and wanting to disown his name. The rest of the family may not react the same way, leading to split loyalties and great confusion.

The other case is where a man can't marry his children's mother, for example because he's separated from his wife. Either surname can end up in the birth registers, and different children may choose different surnames. They may use one name except when the occasion seems to call for the other, "official", name.

But in some families, they do seem to just pick one or other surname for no obvious reason. As you say, they were not trying to make things easy for use now.

 

My family has been searching for a very long time for my grandfather's brother, who was said to have survived WW1 but never went home. He couldn't be found in any records after the 1901 census and seemed to have disappeared. Last year I had a new DNA match with someone who I didn't recognise and couldn't place in my tree, although I knew from the shared matches that they must be somehow related to my grandfather. It turned out that my new DNA match was the granddaughter of a man who only appeared in records from 1904 onwards and after swapping information, family stories, and photographs it became clear that my missing relative was her mysterious grandfather, who had left home to join the army in 1904 under a totally different surname from the one he'd had up until then. He also changed his middle name. His new surname was that of one of his cousins, though we are not sure if that's why he chose it. He probably dropped his original middle name and surname because they were his father's name and there was a rift between them. Without DNA I don't think the connection would ever have been made.

 

This may have happened more frequently than we realise. My own grandfather did it, and lived under his assumed name for the remainder of his life. He had a story to explain the change of name to the family, but the truth only came to light when I found his attestation papers under his original name and his demob papers under his new name. My wife's family also has an example. In this case the individual went awol on the battlefield in France, but subsequently donned the uniform from a different regiment and fought on with a new name. He made the mistake of assuming that by the 1930s it was safe for him to change back to his original name. I have a copy of the letter informing his mother that her son had been found alive in Canada. I can't imagine how she must have felt on discovering that the son she thought had died 15 years before had been alive the whole time. Whether he changed his name again I don't know, but he disappeared and even his own children have no idea what happened to him.