One of the more frustrating aspects of researching the Kerley genealogy has been the inconsistency with which the name has been spelled. Over the past three centuries the name has been spelled in many different ways including, but not limited to: Kerley, Kerly, Kearley, Kearly, Kirley, Kirly, Kirlay, Carely, Carly, Carley, Curly, Curley and many other variations. This inconsistency probably arose from a combination of a lack of formal education among family members and misunderstandings and mistakes made by people who recorded the names (e.g. census takers, town clerks, etc.).
In tracing a line of descent (or ascent) it is often forgotten that prior to a hundred and fifty years ago there was no standard for spelling; ours was a purely phoenetic language. Words were spelled in any way that indicated to the writer the sound when spoken. And this was complicated by the fact that the same letters or combination of letters did not convey the same sound to all hearers.
Even now there are slight regional variations in pronunciation, but then Colonial America and especially the South was an area where many dialects met. Here one had not only variations of Germanic tongues and several French patois, but from the British Isles alone Cornish, Welsh, lowland Scots, Gaelic, Erse and many local English dialects. The person writing a name spelled it with the letters which to him indicated the sound he had heard pronounced. Thus, if the record was prepared by someone other than the person concerned the spelling might depend on the spelling that to the person writing it indicated the sound rather than that of the person saying it.
Stephenson, Jean, Scotch-Irish Migration to South Carolina, 1772 (1971) at 109. The lack of consistency in the spelling of the name in the original records, combined with subsequent transcription errors, has created many problems for Kerley researchers. Many researchers have mistakenly added certain members to a Kerley family while others have completely missed entire families simply because of misspellings.
To make this problem even more confusing, there were numerous families in early America with names similar to Kerley such as Kirby (or Kerby) and Carly (or Carley). As luck would have it, many of these families lived in the same general locations as Kerley families. Accordingly, it was -- and is -- very easy to mix up these families. Does this particular record refer to a Kerley? Or does it refer to a Kerbey? When faced with this problem, I often found it useful to try and look at the problem from the perspective of the other family. Is this person someone who appears regularly in the records of a Kerbey or Carley family? Is this person someone who seems to fit better with that other family than with our Kerley clan? If so, then I frequently abandoned interest in that person, and assumed that he or she fits more appropriately in that other group. I do not think that I have erroneously dropped too many Kerleys using this approach.
I have found Kerley records, at one time or another, under each of these names or spellings.
Caerley Cearley Kealey Kelly Kirby
Caerly Cearly Kealy Kerbee Kirley
Careley Cerley Kearlee Kerbey Kirly
Carely Cerly Kearley Kerby Kisley
Cariley Curbey Kearly Kerlee Kisly
Caril Curby Keiley Kerley Kurley
Carley Curley Keily Kerly Kurly
Carly Curly Kelley Kirbey Kairley
KERLEY PRONUNCIATIONS
Another area contributing to the difficulty in researching this family is the proper pronunciation of the name “Kerley.” Today, the generally accepted pronunciation is something that generally sounds like “curley.” Thus, a lot of research time has focused (and in my view, wasted) on variations of that sound.
My theory is that our name was originally pronounced “CARE LEE”, that is, something that rhymes with “barely.” On various trips to Belfast over the past 20 years, I showed random residents of Northern Ireland the name “Kerley” spelled out on a sheet of paper and asked them to tell me what it said. Invariably, each person read the name as “CARE LEE”, not as Curley. Since many of the early records regarding our family that still survive were probably orally communicated to someone outside the family (for example, the 1790 and 1800 censuses), it is critical for a researcher to understand this distinction. Recognizing pronunciation variations can help you identify records containing spellings that typify this pronunciation; they are records that you might otherwise forget.
In the South, CARE-LEE evolved to KEAR-LEE (rhymes with ‘dearly”), thus creating numerous spellings along the lines of Kearley. In the North, the pronunciation evolved to the CUR-LEE format that most of us use today. The records that we are now using to reconstruct the history of our family were created hundreds of years ago by people who “listened” to someone pronounce a name that they then transcribed. Recognizing the regional variances in speech patterns, drawls, and dialects makes Kerley family historian’s job a bit easier.