Livingstone or Livingston Spelling?
Posted: Sun Mar 15, 2009 3:50 pm
Virginia Adams a recent visitor to our forum has asked about the significance of the Livingstone or Livingston spelling. To my way of thinking no matter what the preferred spelling might have been by those architects of the name change from highland Maconlea/Maclea to Livingstone/Livingston, ultimately personal preference I think has motivated our people to go with one spelling or the other. Certainly connections to old highland family and pride of Dr. Livingstone would influenced some to maintain the e, but the results I found after checking all of the Livingstone/Livingston census entries parish by parish throughout Scotland for several censuses in the 19th century were quite surprising to me. The preference seemed to be overwhelmingly even in the highlands for the Livingston spelling. I included a number of census records as means of comparison and make certain that it was a consistent trend. Here are the number of Livingstones and Livingstons that i found in the 1841,1851,1861 and 1871 Census records. I dont know how many were missed during the census and if this is a completely accurate representation but I hope that it gives one a pretty good idea of an approximate number of those with these names that were censused and what proportion used that name. I also realize that some of the names could be the spelling of the census taker and not the person censused, but hopefully that does not throw off the accuracy of this information too much. I should have probably included Levingston and some othe spelling variations but the exercize at this point was to study the amount and distribution of Livingstones/Livingstons in Scotland. Livingstones/Livingstons in th Scottish Census Livingstone