Over the last year or so I have collected quite a lot of data for my one name study. Since then I have been working on a number of family trees centred on the North Riding of Yorkshire, Cumberland, Westmorland and Lincolnshire. The surname Sarginson and its variants does not seem to have a single point of origin although there are some similarities between the variants for different parts of the country. For example, in Lincolnshire Sarjantson and Serjantson seem to dominate while in Yorkshire Sarginson is more common.

This summer I decided that the pile of data on my desk was getting too large and was preventing me from undertaking a number of interesting projects related to specific family groups which I would like to spend time working on. So I embarked on a complete review of the data I already have. While I was going through it I found that there were many more ways to spell the Sarginson surname than I had previously encountered, including some rather strange deviant spellings. The following table gives a flavour of these.

I too have some difficulties with old handwriting, however some of the deviant spellings do seem to have come about as a result of difficulties identifying between  s, t and f. Others are rather more surprising like Sylvester and Anjantson. Oh well time to go back to the data. Much of it is for people in Lincolnshire, a county I’m not very familiar with.