ONE FAMILY YET 2 DIFFERENT SURNAMES - PADOVANO or PADUANO

[slinkysilv]

Hi I am new to Italiangenealogy and loving it - I think I have found 2 distant relatives, from my mother's side and my father's side - I have sent private messages to the members and am waiting on their reply. Fingers crossed they receive my messages and reply.

I believe my grandfather's (mum's father) correct surname was PADUANO, but when his birth was registered it was registered as PADOVANO. I was told that it had something to do with the person who registered the birth name thought my great grandfather was speaking in dialect and didn't pronounce his own surname correctly. So my grandfather's surname was registered as PADOVANO as were some of his other siblings and yet some of his other siblings were registered as PADUANO.

I would love to hear if anyone else had the same happen to them.

[PippoM]

That was quite usual until recent times.
It depended on dialectal pronounce of surname.
It's not a matter of "correct" pronounce. A name was just a name, a way to identify an individual, until there was a formalization of it, and most people could not read nor write.
Today, having just one letter vary in different documents is an issue (at least in Italy). At that time, it wasn't.
As an example, in the 1700's the surname of my family was usually written "Morcaldo", then, little by little, it became Morcaldi and Moccaldi, but it was not actually "changed" at one moment.

[PippoM]

That was quite usual until recent times.
It depended on dialectal pronounce of surname.
It's not a matter of "correct" pronounce. A name was just a name, a way to identify an individual, until there was a formalization of it, and most people could not read nor write.
Today, having just one letter vary in different documents is an issue (at least in Italy). At that time, it wasn't.
As an example, in the 1700's the surname of my family was usually written "Morcaldo", then, little by little, it became Morcaldi and Moccaldi, but it was not actually "changed" at one moment.