My aunt, Bonnie Heiskell Peters, is the family genealogist. In fact, she has published three books celebrating the history and people of Union County, Tennessee. When I first became interested in exploring family history, she warned me that misspellings could be roadblocks to research.

Here’s one story:

Ura Otis Turner’s photo is taken from “Our Union County Families” by Winnie Palmer McDonald and Bonnie Heiskell Peters.
When he was only twenty-two years old, my grandfather, Ura Otis Turner, was killed in a coal mine in Kentucky. It was 1916. My mother was eighteen months old. My grandmother, Elsie Louzinia Seymour, would eventually remarry Dempsey Valpo Heiskell, also a widower. With that marriage, my mother and her sister Dot became the youngest children in the Heiskell family—at least for a while. Neither of them had memory of the handsome young man who was their biological father.

Time made Ura Turner easy to forget, but I remember a years-ago afternoon on my grandmother’s front porch with a visitor, a man, who shook his head lamenting to my grandmother, “I got him that job.”

“Where was this coal mine?” I wondered. What had happened? Who were his parents? His siblings? I have always had the idea that this coal mining job was temporary—just an opportunity to earn enough money to get the young couple on their feet. How long had he worked there? What had he done before that? Did others from Union County go to the Kentucky mines?

Seeking answers, down the Ancestry rabbit hole I went. When I climbed out five hours later, I had a a bit more information and a deeper understanding of one of the primary challenges of ancestry research: spelling.

With Ancestry, I found “Eura” Turner’s death certificate. He was killed in the Clear Fork mine in Bell County, Kentucky. The cause of death is listed as “skull fracture from falling slate.” He must have looked awful when they opened his casket, and they most assuredly did, because in the family telling, he was “crushed.” His father George R. Turner and his mother Typhenia were listed on the death certificate. My grandmother is not listed as a survivor.

A few years later, my mother’s name is misspelled on the census that was taken when she was four years old, and her stepfather Dempsey was listed as “Depapsy.” On various documents, Seymour is spelled: Seemore, Seamore, Seymore…you get the idea.

This makes me wonder if there’s a relationship between my father’s insistence that my middle name be spelled Anne and my mother’s fretting, “Nobody is going to remember to include that e.”