When we started our search we had assumed that Fairholm and Fairholme were entirely separate surnames. We were wrong and we found 24 other spellings amongst our ancestors. Some people had different spellings recorded for their birth, marriage and death. This was not because they changed their name, but, because so few people were literate, they relied on others to fill in forms for them, and it depended on how these people spelt what they heard. One of our distant relatives was christened as a Fearham, married as a Fairholme and died as a Fairholm, according to official records. Such differences in spellings are not unique to our families. As an extreme case, there have been 459 recorded spellings of Shakespeare throughout the world!

The main variations for the first four letters and the last letters which have been found in the family names are set out on the left hand side below. Not all of the possible combinations occur and some only occur as single examples. The most common combinations are Fairholm and Fairholme. In addition, there are Scottish contractions and extensions - for example Fairholm to Fairm and back again. However, we have to be careful in our research because some of the variations of our name are valid names for other families - particularly Fairham. Spellings adopted by the English and Scottish families did not settle down until the end of the nineteenth century, when the distinction between Fairholm and Fairholme became consistently separate - although there has still been the occasional slip-up in the registers of births, marriages and deaths.