So, How do you spell it?
You must have noticed there are many ways of spelling our surname: the T can be followed by any vowel, one p or two, the i could be y or ey, and it can end in n, ng, or without either, but it’s always two syllables. However, that’s not all.
I thought I knew all the variants, until an online search for Ta*pl* in PCC wills found the "Will of Samuel Topliffe otherwise Toplin, belonging to His Majesty's Ship Albion of Plymouth Dock, Devon."
I wouldn’t have expected that even in the 17th century, but this was February 1806. Is this your family? Was Topliffe an alias caused by his mother’s re-marriage, or a spelling irregularity? Transcribing the will might give us an answer, if it can’t be found any other way. Dilemma: should I now collect all the other Topliffe wills as well?
I haven’t, so far, but having this one in the index should bring it to our attention should Topliffe ever come up again. Likewise Tamplin, a Gloucestershire farmer in 1844: hitherto I have ignored Tamplin and I would have ignored him, but 6 years later was the will of a Taplin widow from Bristol, with no obvious will or admon of a Mr Taplin of Bristol, so I included him followed by the other Tamplin I found. The National Archives Documents Online ‘fuzzy search’ for Thomas Taplin also gave me Taplyn, Taplis, Tamplin, Taplen, Caplin, and Aplin quite a range!
Spellings standardised as education became more general, so by the 1881 census there were far fewer variations around than there were in previous centuries or did they just not come up in my searches?
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