Family Historian User Group

I have just got back to using FH V4 (and family history) and would like advice on how to input the following:

Parish register entry: Dowsett, William Brooks baseborn Sept 1811. (Baptism record?).

This William, his spouse and child (another William) are recorded on the child's birth cert as Brook Dowsett e.g. no 's'. Son William goes onto use Brooks Dowsett consistantly. A registrar mistake?

William Brooks Dowsett (father) 1840 police pay slip signed as Brooks Dowsett.

1841 census entry: William Dowsett (Occup Police Constable). Spouse, children and ages indicate strongly same original William.

Census for 51, 61, 71 ,81 and death cert entries as William Brooks Dowsett.

Happy that I should use Brooks Dowsett, but what should I use for the 1841 census and the son's birth cert?

I hope to display all this information on a diagram for future research although still to read that part of the manual.

ID:5944

In FH V4 open the Property Box for these Individuals in turn.
On the Main tab, to the right of the Name box, there is a more... link to the Names/Tiles window.
In this window you can add as many Alternative Names as you like.
These can then appear on a Diagram using a Text Scheme Item Template such as a.k.a. %INDI.NAME[2+]:ADORNED_FULL% which will display all the also known as (a.k.a.) names.

Which name you choose as the Primary Name is something of a personal choice, but as your evidence overwhelmingly points to Brooks Dowsett then that is fine.

Regarding individual Events, such as 1841 Census and son's Birth Certificate, record an exact transcript in the Source Record under Text From Source and link a Multimedia image of the document.
You could also add a Note to the Event itself saying the Name does not quite match.
I think it would get too busy on Diagrams to identify which Events recorded each variant of an Individuals Name.
In older documents the variants sometimes become numerous.

I can't speak for other's, but I use Ancestral sources for entering my Baptism and census (and soon Marriage) data.
I stay with the spelling in my file, then create the auto text entry for citation text and amend the spelling there to reflect the original source. Using AS you can also save an image of your source to your file as well, so you have it both ways.

Similar to John, I go for a particular name and stick with it. Any other versions or spelling of it can be recorded as part of the transcription in the source record.

As you go further back the spellings become less relevant. Most common folk (my ancestors are very working class!) weren't literate until the mid 1800s or later, so the minister or person filling in the census form, etc. would ask their name and spell it as they heard it. So for example if your name is Cook but ancestors sometimes appear in records as Cooke, its interesting to note that but does it really mean anything? The spelling of the name may well have had no relevance at all to the ancestor in question.