The Long and Short of It

Regarding your brick-wall strategy to search for abbreviated names (October 2004): Also watch for abbreviations that indexers turned into other names. I had trouble finding my great-grandparents' marriage records. There was no Samuel Peters in the grooms book for the parish I knew they had to be in. But there was a Saul Peters, and finally the clerk pulled that original record for me. We discovered that the papers all had Saml for Samuel, and the indexer had read it wrong. It didn't help that his bride, Eliza Jane Cole, was listed as Lizer Jane Cole.