Everyone’s first question is: why? Why would my ancestor have two different names? In some cases people had more than that. Although an alias was often adopted to hide from officialdom, it doesn’t necessarily mean that your ancestor was some sort of hardened criminal.
An alias must be distinguished from other potential reasons for having an alternative name. For example, writers have commonly adopted a different name when authoring books. This is usually called a pseudonym: the real name of Lewis Carroll who wrote Alice in Wonderland was Charles Lutwidge Dodgson. Similarly, genealogists will be familiar with the minor variations of an ancestor’s name which can appear in family records. These might include nicknames such as Polly for women whose real name was Mary, and the slightly frustrating tendency of some of our ancestors for shuffling around their first and second given names. In about 1870 John Theobald Denny, for example, suddenly decided to call himself Theobald John Denny instead.
Sometimes the spelling of a foreign name meant that aliases were adopted either inadvertently because British people kept getting the name wrong, or deliberately in an attempt to anglicise an overseas name to make it more familiar. For example, Christian Bernhardt Braun was
