i catch your irony, but this subject is interesting to me. i've done a fair amount of reading the past several years of old documents. it's shocking to us to see the casual way words and even people's names were spelled. we are so conditioned to paying attention to spelling that it actually interferes with our understanding what people back then had no trouble with. people spelled phonetically then, and if a word could likely be pronounced correctly, the spelling would be considered adequate. there's an important legal document, so i've read, that has a man's name spelled three different ways. all three spellings would be pronounced about the same, so all was good back then. we are so picky that way that i wonder what affect it would have on the interpretation of a legal document today.
back then people's family names got changed sometimes without their knowledge on immigrating to this nation. a scribe would ask the name and the applicant would respond. apparently the scribes would never inquire the spelling but would just write down what it sounded like. it really didn't matter. the family could go right back to using the old spelling. and it wasn't unusual for two or three slightly different spellings to be used by the children of the family. some might stick with middlebrooks, say, while others take the name middlebrook, middlebrooke, or maybe something like mettelbrucken, which might have been the family name before immigrating. with our emphasis on spelling it drives us nuts to study our family backgrounds, and most of us don't have that far to go.