Last month Paul Howes posted on the GOONS‘ list on Rootsweb about spelling problems. He suggested that in times past, the culture was more concerned with how a name sounded than how is was spelled – Shakespeare for example used 3 different versions of his name. Now we are in a written culture.

I do like this idea. It may go some way to explaining the number of different spellings of Micklethwaite (over 250 at the last count!)

I negotiated with LostCousins to enter some of my One Name Study Micklethwaites on to their excellent site. However manually transferring the 380 entries from my 1841 census records would be a pain. So I built on my earlier experiences with Excel and IE (see a previous blog) and needed just 2 keypress combinations and a mouse click to enter all the names – it took just a few hours to do it, including debugging the macros. Excel macros really are powerful – but they do take some getting used to.

Yes, Sir Michael Caine is a Micklethwaite.

He was born Maurice Joseph Micklewhite in South London in 1933 and using the censuses and parish registers available online I have traced his family back to Joseph Micklewait who married Phillis Price Wagner in 1809.

As online records are not complete, that’s where the story stops for now, but recent Micklewhites in London are in the main descended from this couple.  I noticed that some other Micklethwaites were recorded as Micklewhite in the 1700s and 1800s showing that some Londoners have always had difficulty pronouncing our name.

I’m not going to post all the details of Sir Michael’s line here yet as I hope to have an article published in a magazine, but do contact me if you want more details.