Ever wondered what accent your ancestors had?

[cavvytri]

  I spent ages searching for Arle's in Northumberland after talking to old relations....Turns out their Northumbrian accents had turned the real name of EARL into Arle!

All my relations on Dads side had/have Scottish accents, Mothers geat grandparents came from Kent and Hampshire then moved up to Northumberland for work and their descendents are now Geordies, and my OH is an Australian, so a bit of a mixture!

[maggbill]

Thanks Imber for the German link to the POW recordings.. What fascinating stuff!!!  amazing to hear these 100 year old recordings of Glasgow/Aberdeen individuals and to know a bit of their story!!
cheers

[annesthreads]

Not just accents - I'd love to know which of my ancestors around the Shropshire/Wales borderlands were Welsh speakers and which were English speakers.

Mike

The Welsh census indicates which language people spoke - a friend I was doing some research for was fascinated to find out that her grandmother was a Welsh speaker.

[annesthreads]

This fascinates me too. I was intrigued to be told that my Northern Irish great grandfather's first language was Irish Gaelic. I have a family called Brandish, from Salford, but who I've traced back to near a village called Brundish in Suffolk. Did a Manchester clergyman or enumerator hear a Suffolk "u" as a northern "a"? Seems feasible - when, with my Manchester accent,  I worked in London in the 1970s, I soon learned that I had to spell out names with an "a" in them, or they would often be written down as "u" by the southerner on the other end of  the phone! And my Gloucestershire great x 4 grandfather went to Manchester from Berkeley in Gloucestershire. His birthplace on one of the censuses is given as "Birkley", so obviously he pronounced it as spelled.

[BW252]

would the accent a person had have made a difference to how their name was written down on a census for example.   I have an ancestor named Tobit who eventually became Talbot!   Took an age (and of course the help of rootschatters to track her down.

[avm228]

Usually accent made no difference at all to the census enumeration - it was not carried out by interview.  The enumerator dropped off household schedules for completion and then collected and transcribed them into a summary book.

Sometimes he'd have had to ask questions, however, if the form had not been properly or legibly completed due to illiteracy or other reasons.

[LizzieL]

One name I am research is Eltham, I have several instances where it has been written Heltham, presumably they didn't want it to sound like they were dropping their aitches.
And similarly with another of my surname - (H)annetts

[LizzieW]

Usually accent made no difference at all to the census enumeration - it was not carried out by interview.  The enumerator dropped off household schedules for completion and then collected and transcribed them into a summary book.

Sometimes he'd have had to ask questions, however, if the form had not been properly or legibly completed due to illiteracy or other reasons.

Yes but many people were illiterate, so the enumerator would have filled in the form for them.  In theory, he ought to have understood the accent and probably did, but the fact he could write doesn't mean he would know how to spell all the different names.

[annesthreads]

Another one from my family - there's the rather odd name Saycell. I wondered, and someone else later confirmed, that this was originally Cecil. Illiterate people were presumably completely reliant on enumerators, clergymen and other officials to write their names down correctly, and given that local accents were much stronger and diverse than now, and said officials came from a different class and probably often locality, it's not surprising that spellings and even the actual name often got changed.