There are a number of variants of the name GRIBBLE. The spelling GRIBBLE is by far the most common, both geographically at this time, and historically. In the past, however, it is important to understand that many people were illiterate or at best only partially literate, and when names were recorded they were typically recorded by a 'third party', often a curate or other church employee less literate then the clergyman, who made a 'best guess'.
That is, the spelling of the name should be considered phonetically, and minor variants are essentially irrelevant (and equivalent) in a historical and genealogical sense.
Throughout our work we have retained the spelling of GRIBBLE. Given our view of the source of many variants of the name, and the prevalence of this spelling, we feel this is 'fair enuff'.
Our apologies to anyone who prefers an alternate spelling!
Following on from our comments above as to why variants of the name arose, our view is that the 'Core' of the spellings of the name derives from the same phonetic argument. That is, the consonants are the key, with additional consonants excluded. This gives us
Gr*b*l*; where *'s = vowel(s)
More precisely, we can expand on the choice of vowels, which gives us
GR [a, ay, e, ey, i, ie, y] B [b, " "] [a, e, i, y, " "] L [l, " "] [e, " "], or
GR [vowel(s)] B - single/double [vowel - ?] L - single/double [e - ?]
We have extracted the following list of variants of the GRIBBLE name from a variety of sources. In particular, we give credit to the Mormons, listing of phonetic equivalents of the name of GRIBBLE, which is freely available from them. We have also included some further variants we have come across in our travels. There are two primary sources to which the various spellings of the name can be attributed:
As we have alluded to, our view is that precise spellings of the name may be a bit of a furphy as historically names were not recorded by their owners, but by third parties who worked phonetically - with varying degrees of interest, uniformity and accuracy. The following variants of the name combine both 'heritages', the English and European. We are working on refining our views as to which are more and less relevant.
The list of variants currently is:
Griball, Gribbal, Gribball
Gribbel, Gribbell, Gribel, Gribell, Gribbel, Gribbell
Gribbill, Gribill
Grible, GRIBBLE
Griblle
Gribbyll, Gribyll
Griebel
Grebel, Grebell, Greble, Grebble
Greebel
Groebell
Grubel
Grybbell, Grybble, Gryble, Grybel
We believe that there are probably other (phonetic) variants which should be included in the list, and that some variant are more likely than others to be carried forward by those related in the GRIBBLE 'clan'. However, further work is needed to understand better how the phonetics work in Europe, since the Germanic languages have different intonations compared to English. If you have comments, or better still some expertise to help us out, please contact us.
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Please send your input, comments and suggestions by email to Jules Gribble or Michael Gribble.
Page Last Updated: 23 December 2003