So, How do you spell it?
As I had not then found the Taply/Taplin links, I only searched for T*pl*n*. I’ve left it at that for now; by 1881 the n or ng ending seems a settled split from those ending in y, so I’ll only add the extra T*ply and T*pley if someone tells me their family was still using both spellings even then. Was yours?
Thinking of the 1881 census, what about this? Look carefully at the surnames:
At 15 Loughboro Street, Lambeth, Surrey, England, were
Charles TABLIN | Head | Married | 22 | M | Lawyers Clerk | Lambeth, Surrey, England |
Elizabeth TAPLIN | Wife | Married | 21 | F | Lambeth, Surrey, England | |
Lillane Annie TABLIN | Daughter | 3m | F | Lambeth, Surrey, England | ||
Ethel TAPLIN | Daughter | 3 | F | Scholar | Lambeth, Surrey, England |
This is from the transcribed version on CD; the image version would show if Tablin was an enumerator’s or a transcription error. So that’s another spelling I hadn’t considered
You’d think Taplin was a safe spelling by 1914, wouldn’t you? Not so: one of our researchers spent ages looking for her Taplin grandmother's marriage, only to find her eventually as Tapling, yet that family had been Taplin in every found record since 1786.
It does make a difference whether I’m searching an index on paper or on computer: unless it’s a very long paper index I read the whole list of T and pick out anything that might just fit, but on computer I use T*pl* if wildcards are allowed [sometimes it has to be Tapl*, Tepl*, Tipl*, Topl*, Tupl*] then I delete or ignore all the Temple, Templeman, and Tipple it finds. Ideally, I’d use the list if wildcards are not allowed, even though it’s far too long to be practicable.
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