The Bedfordshire, England, family of Neale have an old way of occasionally writing their name as Neall, and in searching their records it is confusing to find the same individual thus varying the style of his signature. The writer has talked about this peculiarity with present day members of this family and they say that they have noticed the same peculiarity and family characteristic even in the present generation. As a fact there is in America and in Philadelphia today members of the Bedfordshire branch of the Neale family who write their name as Neall. The early members of our family who came from Bedfordshire all wrote their names as Neale. But by a sort of family agreement the spelling has uniformly assumed a locality style which can be stated to be as follows: All the New England members of the family have dropped the final e and spell their name as Neal. All the Chesapeake, i.e. the Maryland, families, with one exception, retain the original spelling of Neale. Whereas the descendants of Francis Neale, beginning with his children, have uniformly spelled their name as Neall. In the course of the long searches that have resulted in this genealogy I have found that wherever in America I have come across one who used the spelling Neall, he either was straight from Bedfordshire or a descendant of Francis Neale the Quaker of the Eastern Shore of Maryland. - Harry Levy Neall - 1924
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