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I just signed on again after an absence. I am descended from Danfords and am very interested in your research and article you mention.
I discovered something very interesting while researching my Danfords. There is a large American genealogy book on the Danford/Danforth family published about 1901 in America. The original immigrants are Nicholas Danforth and William Danford who came to Boston, Massachusetts, but not together. They were thought by some to be kinsmen, but no one has ever been able to prove that to my knowledge and there were some recent tries in that direction.
I am descended from William Danford/Danforth. His name is written both ways in old Massachusetts records. He, by the way, was brought, according to Mass. court records and testimoney, against his will to American. He and several other young boys/men were rousted from their beds, some crying, by English soldiers. They were taken forcibly to America and sold as indentured servants, a practice I learned was quite common then. His court records indicate he may well have been living in Ireland at the time he was taken. He and his sons moved to New Hampshire and Vermont, where they used the Danford spelling exclusively for several generations. (He was born in 1640 and arrived in the U.S. about 1654.)
Several generations later, my Danfords moved to Illinois, where I reside near Chicago. (1838) In the 1880s several of the male siblings changed the spelling of their name to Danforth from Danford. My mother-in-law, who is of Welsh descent, pointed out to me that in Welsh the dd is pronounced th. As you pointed out, many generations were illiterate and the record keepers of the day were semi-illiterate. Many immigrants to the U.S. faced a dilemma: have your surname correctly pronounced OR have it correctly spelled. It's my guess that they continued to pronounce their surname as Danforth, but spell it as Danford, but finally gave up.
Would love to hear from you.
Lynn Steffen
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