Goslin - Josling – Gosling - Joslin
Both spellings have been used since the introduction of surnames,
confusion of the family surname is still being confounded today,
The reason for my inclusion of the Gosling name on my Joslin web site is both obvious and essential,
if we are to freely search all the family history data that is available today it has to be so.

The use of soundex code searching is very useful but does not give a differential of the two surnames.
One glaring and recent example of the confusion of Gosling & Joslin
was the inclusion of at least 10 families of JOSLIN in the 1901 census that,
on inspection of the enumerators original, clearly shows them to be written as GOSLING,
what is more disturbing,
is the fact that the examples in the 1901 census index will mean that a Gosling searching for the above families,
is unlikely to find them. Even more disconcerting is the high probability that some of our
JOSLIN’s families have been index under GOSLING and may never be found in this 1901 census index.
This example of just one large data base on one census year (1901) show the enormities of the task
of sorting out our Joslin’s from Goslings etc.

In all my UK research on the two families I have quickly discovered that the frequency of Goslings to Joslin’s
is over 2 to 1 and therefore any Gosling studies need twice the effort and in proportion twice as may people seem to be
researching the family name.
The spread of the surname Gosling throughout the UK shows a far more even distribution
compared with the two of three main clusters of Joslin’s, i.e. Essex, London, and Devon.

The effect of this distribution is easily demonstrated on the two distribution maps when using similar data from the
1881 census for the UK.
(Maps Below)
The data bases that can give me a true impression of the surname distributions has to be consistent and accurate,
for my maps I have chosen the UK census for 1881, UK census for 1901,
Also the GRO Index of Births, Marriages and Deaths from 1837 to the present day and the 1851 census of Devon.
For Essex I have used the Census data from 1851, 1861, 1881 and 1901.

  
Above is the Goslin etc.                                                    Above is the Joslin etc.
surname spelling distribution in 1881                                   surname spelling distribution in 1881

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