For most of our ancestors the earliest record will be their baptism, and so the spelling will be whatever the vicar thinks it should be. Change the vicar or move to another parish and the spelling will change.
I'm afraid I mildly disagree Peter and agree with webwiz when he says ...'otherwise it becomes too messy'. With surnames I try to understand the reasons for spelling variations and make notes in my Tribal Pages when they occur and even write stories when I come across 5 or more variations (the record being 11). But I try to stick to one standard spelling; usually the one most often recognised as standard. I do the same with first names but am less troubled with those as I have a job to recall how living various family members spell their names. I and my wife are always mixing up Gill & Jill and Caren & Karen and we have to make notes in our Christmas Card list to ensure we get them right. As for nicknames or variation short forms I tend to show these in brackets, and record them under their baptismal names.
I think it's equally messy for different cousins to use different surnames for the same ancestors. At least if one uses the spelling in the baptism register it's going to be consistent.
Within your own tree it will be consistent but unless your cousins all happen to adopt the same approach, then they may still have a different surname spelling for a particular ancestor than the one you are using.
This is an interesting discussion. I have lots of examples of surname variations in my and my husband's trees and have never been sure which one to use where the name varies during that person's lifetime. The baptismal name is all well and good, but if they have used a different spelling consistently thereafter it's difficult to ignore that, and as Pauline says, cousins may well use different spellings.
Your indecision as to what 'Read/Reed/Reid' to go for is close to home with me also; although with the added problem of some having a 'sub' name before the Read. My first wife's maiden name was Read...actually tell a lie Onan-Read. (The history behind that goes way back when the Onan (not the Onedin
) line married into the Read line) and the name became hyphenated as Onan-Read. But not all her father's siblings followed through and his sisters declared their maiden name as Read, whether baptismal recorded as ' Onan-Read' or not.
I decided to go for Reid, the name under which the family appears in the 1841 census. One of this family was my husband's great-great-grandfather and, despite being baptised as George Reed in 1835, he used the name Reid throughout his life. I have numerous documents recording his 23 years of service in the Essex Police and he appears as Reid in all of them. His father Thomas had a brother who, whilst also being baptised as Reed, used the surname Read all his life. So I have recorded him and his family as Read. I tend to go for the surname that the person used during their lifetime rather than the one at their baptism. Clearly others will disagree, but that feels less confusing for me.
Pass!
Yes I am also swayed by what they -as grown up family members - regard as their true surname and how they spell same. Of course that is not a 'catch all' for everyone, especially on my cousin's maternal line with her mother's maiden name as Twamley, but having an Uncle Twamlow and an Aunt insisting her maiden name was Twomlow.
Agreed, and there was the case I gave above where two alternative spellings are given separated by 'aka'. I've only ever seen this once, in the case I quoted, but maybe it is more common than I realise.
Fortunately, with the exception of the aristocracy, surnames separated with a hyphen are a fairly recent innovation in England, so it's likely to be more of a problem for the researchers of the future.