Yes,, these southern pronunciations are wonderful! I'm not making fun, but these are just things you learn so as not to insult a family in your area. My favorite all-time unusual southern surname pronunciation is "Beauchamps." I about fell out of my chair when a local man politely corrected me to pronounce this as "Beech'-um" with the emphasis on the first syllable.

In my own genealogy we have the line "Proffitt," from, we think, the Scottish highlands. Working on a "Proffitt" forum, a researcher wrote that Scotland had no such name even back in the 1700's when our Proffitt came to Virginia as a "Jacobite" from the Tower of London where he was a prisoner for being in the army that backed the pretender to the throne in the early 1700s. His theory was that our man was actually named "Proudfoot," and may have been illiterate. This researcher wondered if our Mr. Proudfoot probably gave his name to the English clerk who had difficulty making out our guy's Scottish brogue and instead wrote "Proffitt," because that's how it sounded to him. However, this is just a theory.

Bruce Nichols