What is somebody's "real" surname from a set of possible spelling variants?

Question

How do you decide what is somebody's "real" surname? Is there some hierarchy of data sources that you follow or do you just go by preponderance of usage? I'm talking about spelling variants -- not obvious cases where a name is changed during immigration or due to some event such as marriage.

For example, I have a relative who remarried and her second husband's and her new last name was Kenny according to 1930 census. However her 1934 death certificate shows Kenney. Yet her husband's 1932 death certificate shows Kinney. So how to decide what is "correct"? I'd like to know, given the circumstances outlined, what "best practices" are recommended by those of you who have been at this a while and know what you're doing.

Her husband immigrated from Croatia according to the census so there's a chance that his birth name was none of these.

Answer 1

Confusion about names and name variants can lead to confused identities and brick walls.¹ I'm glad to see questions like this posed in context.

You wrote, "How do you decide what is somebody's "real" surname?"

One of the best way to learn someone's real surname is to seek out records containing primary information about the name. For example, forms and/or documents/letters the person filled out, authored and signed. Elizabeth Shown Mills describes this as "standard usage" about those who are/were "literate" and where "signature samples exist." ²

Depending on the record circumstance, the marriage license about your relative and her second husband might include signatures/this kind of primary information. There might be deeds and/or letters, too. You mentioned that he immigrated from Croatia; possibly there is a naturalization record about him that contains his signature.

By comparison, we don't really know the circumstance about how most names would have been enumerated in 1930 US census (probably an oral communication; unidentified informant). As well, the name given for the decedent on a death certificates is provided by a third party, too.

Ha! If she acted as the informant on his 1932 death certificate, then her signature might appear therein.

Notes and References:

1. One of the best ways to learn about usage practices is to read articles in scholarly genealogical journals, such as the Register or Quarterly. A recent article focused on how learning more about a difficult name and its variants helped to solve a genealogy brick wall. See the Register article by Henry Z. Jones, Jr., titled, "The Ancestry of Mary Whitten (Whiting), wife of Ichabod Crippen" [begins at vol 166 (Oct 2012), p. 259] From the article, "By checking various indices of surnames of colonial American families and seeing how “Whiting,” ‘Whiton,” “Whiten,” “Whittin,” “Whetten,” “Witon,” “Whitten,” and even “Whitney” often were used in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in reference to the very same name, a new avenue of exploration as to the ancestry of Mary “Whiting” Crippen opened up. This article is the result of that journey."
2. Elizabeth Shown Mills, "Re: [TGF] Surname spelling variants," Transitional-Genealogists-Forum-L message dated 24 Jun 2011.

Answer 2

Apologies for the misunderstandings. I see now from the modified question that it's specifically the spelling variations you're concerned about.

I think searching for a "real" surname could be a fruitless quest. Some spelling variation will certainly be the product of errors (e.g. illiteracy, recording what was heard, and transcription errors) but some will be deliberate.

My own surname was once spelled consistently as "Procter" in my home town. Somewhere around 1850, the family obviously took the decision to change the spelling as it was just as consistently "Proctor" thereafter.

It's not just surnames too. A case I'm actually working on at the moment concerns someone whose middle name mysteriously changed from "Kindle" to "Kenyon". Since I only have one item of evidence for each alternative, although several items with a middle initial of "K", then I can't say whether either one was an error. I have a strong case for the middle name at baptism (Kindle) being based on the surname of the father as she was illegitimate and there was someone with this rare surname on the same street at the same time. The middle name at marriage (Kenyon) may have been an error (did she not remember her real middle name?) or it could have been deliberate (maybe she wanted to break any connection to her biological father).

In situations of variant names, it's always good to record the evidence verbatim against each cited source. In a good software product, the details of the relevant person will accommodate alternative names. So, the essence of your question is when to copy those variations in the evidence to the accepted alternative names for a person. This has to be on a case-by-case basis. Sometimes it is obviously an error but sometimes it's not an error, and sometimes you may not be certain as in my case above.