Elizabeth Corbit (Hoodt) - Corbitt or Corbit

Not sure on the spelling. Do you have any ideas? Think it is Corbit, but some relatives with different spellings...like my husband Talbert, but some brothers got mad at each other and changed theirs but original was Tolbert. Got the birthdate from Ancestory.com, but not always accurate. Feel free to change if you want/can. I am not a 'genealogist' so don't have 'official' information. I am concerned that several Ancestory trees have different name/wife for Russell who I have shown married to Sallie Corbit. Do you have details like was Sallie married twice?

I am an amateur too.

If we know in which the generation the change happened, we can put the father's spelling under birth-name.

Also, interesting facts like "some brothers got mad at each other and changed theirs but original was Tolbert" can go in the About section of the profile to help the next people trying look things up.

The rule of thumb is to look for a birth or death certificate for the spelling of the name and to put that name in Birth Name, but to put other spellings in the Also Known As field. Sometimes you'll see several spelling variations for an early American family - Howse, House, Hulse for instance. Where the spelling was totally variable, I might put two or three in the actual name fields.

I do it slightly differently from Hatte.:)

I don't like the way "spelling variation / multiple names" look in a name field and I'm concerned that it affects my ability to match record matches, both internally to Geni and using the "external record match" function to Archives, Ancestry.com, and Findagrave.

Record matches match on the last name field. So I use either "name at death event" (what is most likely on a tombstone for a Findagrave match) or "best known as" (how historians have "normalized" the name).

For the birth name field I use whatever I can best find that event. If I don't know, I use the father's name at death to indicate the generational shift.

All other variations go in the AKA field and hopefully the text of the "about" as well. And of course I (try) to note where and what the decisions were based on.