Yes, I've been very frustrated by the "creative" spelling of surnames in my
research, but have not given much thought to how to make it better. I have
encountered many of the alternate spellings you list as well as one you
didn't list "Cothron." Combining spellings under one umbrella is a good
idea...just don't know where the cutoff would be...or if that's even
important. My John Horton was listed as "Huston" because of a poor
transcription of his marriage to Louisa Cothron (Cawthorn, Cauthen, etc,
etc) When I saw the photocopy of the document, I realized that it was
really Hurton, but the transcriber guessed Huston. So would we add Huston
to the Horton family listing because of one slipup? Maybe so, but then we'd
be adding all the alternate spellings of Huston to the mix. Seems
unwieldy...but maybe unwieldy is better than not finding an ancestor because
we didn't, in a million years, ever consider some of these wayout spellings.
If you have an idea how this could work I'd like to give it a try.
Janet Horton-Payne