Pronouncing “Fanny Alger”

I’ve been working on a biography of Fanny Alger, a woman whose story often gets flattened and tagged onto questions about Joseph Smith and early Mormon polygamy. I have presented the main contours of her actual life story before, and have worked behind the scenes with many scholars as I finish my manuscript. Surprisingly, the topic of her name comes up with some frequency. How she pronounced it seems to have gotten lost in the discussion, even when commentators offer corrections to the conventional pronunciation of “Alger.” For my project, this minor nuance actually relates to my main interest in her life story.

Put succinctly, I believe the historiography has misrepresented Fanny W. Custer (née Alger). Annette Gordon-Reed, the historian who wrote the definitive study of the Hemings family and their relationship to Thomas Jefferson, confronted a similar historiographical challenge when writing about Sally Hemings. Because so much controversy surrounded whether Jefferson had a relationship and children with Hemings, Sally herself got sidelined. (Probably not coincidentally, it was the same Fawn Brodie who launched the historical arguments that did this to both Sally Hemings and Fanny Alger.) Gordon-Reed once said this about the problem: “I discovered long ago that many people are not much interested in Sally Hemings as a person. They are interested in her as a symbol. The details of her life do not matter to them.” That’s Custer: she has functioned as a trope attached to someone else’s moral reputation, and in effect, has been marginalized from her own life story.

Even her name reflects this sidelining effect. Although she presented herself as Fanny W. Custer her whole adult life, she is known to us by her childhood and adolescent name, and then, recent discussions have hypercorrected the pronunciation further away from her own likely experience.

It matters that we center Custer historiographically within her own life story—at some point, at least. This means getting her self-presentation right where possible. Before she married Solomon Custer in 1836, did she go by Fanny “Al-jur,” Fanny “Ahl-grr,” or by something else? One sliver of family lore has perpetuated an alternative pronunciation, while primary sources themselves suggest otherwise.

Ancestors and Family of Origin

FWC’s paternal grandfather, John Alger, descended from Massachusetts Algers who had migrated from England and pronounced their surname as the word “auger,” /'ɔ:gər/: distinguished by the silent /l/ sound, hard /g/ sound, and stress on the first syllable.¹ In eighteenth-century New England, “auger” was a rhotic word with a hard /g/ and a backed vowel.² This distinction, both in North American rhoticity and English origin of the name, set apart FWC’s ancestors from other immigrant groups bearing the Alger name from France and Germany who pronounced it like Algier and Allgaier (or Adalger) respectively.³ The earliest records of the John and Elizabeth Alger family maintained the English “Alger” spelling: a record in Uxbridge, Massachusetts, in the late 1700s; a land deed in 1790; and John’s last will and testament in 1800.⁴ The surname within their family through Samuel and Clarissa Alger to FWC and her siblings widely kept this spelling beyond the alternatives. Signatures preserved in documents always bore the “Alger” spelling.

By the 1860s, Horatio Alger had become a household name in the United States thanks to his widely published stories, who pronounced his surname as /'æl:dzer/: with the hard /l/ sound, soft /g/ sound, and stress on the first syllable.⁵ There occurred a widespread transformation between the generation of John Alger and that of Horatio that annunciated the /l/, softened the /g/, and shifted the starting vowel to an /æ/ sound. FWC’s parents belonged to the generation of Algers who straddled that transformation. FWC very likely heard her parents pronounce “auger” and /'æl:dzer/, and also encountered the more common /'æl:dzer/ with rising frequency. She may have pronounced her childhood surname any number of ways according to the generational and regional shifts she experienced.

The extended families of Algers of Massachusetts regionally connected Samuel Alger to the Algers of Bridgewater who included Fanny Washburn Alger (a woman often confused in later genealogical records for FWC), first cousin of Horatio Alger. The /'æl:dzer/ pronunciation evident in Horatio’s family by the 1830s was within a couple of degrees of separation genealogically and forty miles geographically (Uxbridge to Bridgewater) of FWC’s Alger family. A fair assumption would include FWC’s Algers within the phonetic space of Horatio Alger’s extended family.

Phonetic Change?

However, alternate spellings of “Alger” occurring in some records may suggest pronunciation variance. Such variation in contemporaneous sources might serve as linguistic traces of phonetic change that may provide evidence toward inferring how FWC presented herself and her childhood surname. All told, the misspelled instances of “Alger” appear most strongly tied to generational strata, and then to regional-dialectical patterns. For instance, “Algur,” “Algar,” “Algor,” and “Aulger” appear in a few records mentioning FWC’s Alger grandfather in New York and her father in New York, Ohio, and Illinois; “Algee” and “Alder” appear in two records mentioning her father in Ohio and Utah, respectively; “Olger” appears in a later secondhand mention of FWC and her brother among Utah critics of polygamy; and “Alger” appears consistently across the remaining sources mentioning FWC and her siblings.⁶ Descendants of FWC’s younger brother John from southern Utah have disagreed among themselves about the pronunciation, with some insisting on a slight variant of the original English that stresses the /l/ and hard /g/ sounds and the majority holding to the more common version.⁷

The most spelling variation of any of FWC’s immediate family members and cousins occurred with her father, Samuel. Only one instance of FWC herself bears a variant of “Alger”; her siblings, likewise, nearly always appear as “Alger,” her brother John (more than the others) as “Algar.” But Samuel appears as “Alger,” “Algar,” “Aulger,” “Algee,” and “Alder,” lending signs of a shift between his father and his children. The strongest direct evidence that FWC’s siblings pronounced their surname differently than their father was in a court summons in Adams County, Illinois, in 1841. The case against Horace Burgess brought subpoenas to several residents nearby in three installments. Samuel Alger and his sons John and Alvah were each called in separate summons, not as a group, thus at different intervals during hearings before a circuit judge. The clerk, C. M. Woods, wrote the summons on printed forms as a phonetic transcription during hearings, not from references on written records. He wrote “Samuel Aulger Sr.” but “John Alger” and “Alva Alger,” clear variance conveyed by the same person on the same occasion for the same family members, but not necessarily known to Woods to be the sons and father of each other.⁸

Another variation, “Algee,” corresponds to a diminutive of the name “Algernon,” with the widespread pronunciation of /'æl:dzernon/, given its French etymology.⁹ At least one of the Algers’ contemporaries in the Kirtland area went by this name, Algernon Sidney Gilbert, but no documents indicate anyone called him “Algee” for short. Families with the surname “Algee” and “Algie” appear with enough frequency in the federal censuses of the period that the Kirtland official who issued a warrant for “Samuel Algee” could have inferred “Algee” from hearing the soft /g/ pronunciation of “Alger.”

FWC adopted her niece, Sophronia Sarah Alger (1860–1931), after her brother Thomas died in 1862.¹⁰ Sophronia grew up in Dublin, Indiana, and eventually married another Dublin resident, Luther Bond, in 1875.¹¹ For at least ten years, FWC would have presented the “Alger” name whenever presenting her niece by her niece’s full name, the same, of course, as FWC’s own maiden surname. Sophronia eventually relocated to California, where she was reunited with her long lost siblings.¹² The descendants of Sophronia’s father, Thomas, maintained a soft /g/ pronunciation of Alger, suggesting Sophronia had gone by this pronunciation.¹³ Her maternal grandfather, Esaias Edwards, wrote “Algar” in his journal and letters to his daughter (Thomas’s widow), Sarah Ann Edwards Alger.¹⁴ This particular spelling did not always indicate a hard /g/ sound, however—Horatio Alger, for instance, was sometimes presented by others as “Horatio Algar,” particularly in British publications. The Latter-day Saints who wrote “Algar” when referring to Samuel Alger, including those near John Alger in southern Utah, generally immigrated from Great Britain, a possible phonetic translation common to mid-nineteenth-century British-English accent patterns.¹⁵ A loose pattern across federal census records of the period shows “Algar” spellings corresponding with Algers and “Algire” and “Algyer” spellings corresponding with German-descended Allgaiers—the former with the soft /g/ and the latter with the hard /g/ pronunciations.¹⁶ We cannot be sure iterations of “Algar” for Samuel Alger and his immediate family members were ever intended to indicate a hard /g/ sound.

Likelihood of the Common Pronunciation

Given the shift in pronuncation for Samuel Alger’s generation and the consistency of the “Alger” spelling for FWC and her siblings—as well as the proximity of FWC to relatives, descendants, and other Algers along the common pronunciation—her self-presentation did not likely involve the older accented “auger” or hard /g/ versions. A reasonable pronuncation, therefore, of “Fanny Alger” would follow the common one. Barring the discovery of a stronger direct source indicating an alternative, historians should not need a signal pronunciation to serve as a shibboleth for technical versus amateur understanding of FWC’s life or of early Mormon history.

1. Arthur M. Alger, “The Alger Family of Maine,” The Historical and Genealogical Register (Boston) 29, no. 7 (July 1875): 270–272; Arthur M. Alger, A Genealogical History of that Branch of the Alger Family which Springs from Thomas Alger of Taunton and Bridgewater, in Massachusetts, 1665–1875 (Boston: David Clapp and Son, 1876), 5.
2. Johnson’s English Dictionary, as Improved by Todd, and Abridged by Chalmers; with Walker’s Pronouncing Dictionary, Combined: To Which Is Added, Walker’s Key to the Classical Pronunciation of Greek, Latin, and Scripture Proper Names (Boston: Charles Ewer and T. Harrington Carter, 1828), 114, s.v., “auger.”
3. Patrick Hanks and Flavia Hodges, “A Dictionary of Surnames,” in Patrick Hanks, Flavia Hodges, A. D. Mills, and Adrian Room, eds., The Oxford Names Companion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 21, s.v., “Alger”; C. O. Sylvester Mawson, International Book of Names: A Dictionary of the More Difficult Proper Names in Literature, History, Philosophy, Religion, Art, Music, and Other Studies, Together with the Official Form and Pronunciation of the Names of Present-Day Celebrities and Places throughout the World (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1933), 16–17.
4. Uxbridge Vital Records, Marriages and Intent, Births, Deaths, 1717–1837, p. 267, Uxbridge Town Hall, Worcester County, Massachusetts; Aaron Taft Jr. and Robert Taft, Deed for Property in Bloomfield to John Alger, 27 February 1790, Deed Records, 3:146–148, Ontario County, New York; John Alger, Last Will and Testament, 11 March 1800, Probate Records, Wills and Letters, 2:293, Ontario County, New York.
5. See Gary Scharnhorst, The Lost Life of Horatio Alger, Jr. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985); John K. Bollard, ed., Pronouncing Dictionary of Proper Names (Detroit: Omnigraphics, 1993), 22. Arthur M. Alger noted in 1875 how the pronunciation had shifted “recently” away from Auger, in tandem with the Horatio Alger’s growing fame.
6. “Algur/Algar/Algor/Aulger”: Census, 1800, Bloomfield, Ontario County, New York, 392–393; Duplicate of the Land Tax, Tax Record, 1823, 66:2, Ashtabula County, Ohio; Duplicate of the Land Tax, Tax Record, 1825, 68:5, Ashtabula County, Ohio; C. M. Woods, clerk, Summons for Zerah Pulsipher, Samuel Alger Sr., David Garner, and Burr Riggs, 9 September 1841, State of Illinois v. Horace Burgess, People’s Case Files, box 7, case 132, Court Records, Adams County, Illinois; Esaias Edwards, Autobiography, circa 1855–1882, pp. 26, 66, 76, 99, Overland Trails Diaries, MSS 184, Harold B. Lee Library, Brigham Young University, Provo, Utah; W. H. McIntosh, History of Ontario Co., New York, with Illustrations Descriptive of Its Scenery, Palatial Residences, Public Buildings, Fine Blocks, and Important Manufactories, from Original Sketches by Artists of the Highest Ability (Philadelphia: Everts, Ensign, and Everts, 1876), 216 (but “John Alger” on p. 219); “Algee/Alder”: Roswell D. Cottrell and John Parks, Warrant to Stephen Sherman, 21 October 1833, Kirtland Township Trustees Minutes, 115–116, Lake County Historical Society, Painesville, Ohio; Census, 1870, Parowan, Iron, Utah Territory, 6; “Olger”: Historicus (pseud.), “Sketches from the History of Polygamy: Joseph Smith’s ‘Special Revelations.’” Anti-Polygamy Standard 2, no. 1 (April 1881): 1; John Pierce Hawley, Autobiography, 1885, 97, Miscellaneous Collection, P13, fd. 317, Community of Christ Library and Archives, Independence, Missouri.
7. Janet Hassard, Interview with David Golding, 12 August 2023; Allen Alger, Note on Ezra Alger (born 1781), http://algerclan.org/getperson.php?personID=I15412 (archived at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.8370820); Allen Alger, Email to David Golding, 4 March 2024; compare with Mary Stuart Mackey and Maryette Goodwin Mackey, The Pronunciation of 10,000 Proper Names: Giving Famous Geographical and Biographical Names, Names of Books, Works of Art, Characters in Fiction, Foreign Titles, etc. (New York: Dodd, Mead, and Co., 1922), 10, s.v., “Alger.”
8. Woods, Summons, 9 September 1841; C. M. Woods, clerk, Summons for William Burgess, Hannah Burgess, Owen Shepherd, and John Alger, 9 September 1841, State of Illinois v. Horace Burgess, People’s Case Files, box 7, case 132, Court Records, Adams County, Illinois; C. M. Woods, clerk, Summons for Sarah Pulsipher, Alvah Alger, Frederick Burgess, and William Clark, 9 September 1841, State of Illinois v. Horace Burgess, People’s Case Files, box 7, case 132, Court Records, Adams County, Illinois.
9. Bollard, ed., Pronouncing Dictionary, 22; Mawson, International Book of Names, 16–17.
10. Sophronia Alger Bond appears variously in records as “Sarah Saphronia Alger,” “Saphronia Sarah Alger,” “Sophronia Alger,” and “Aunt Fronie.” Firsthand contemporaneous records in Dublin, Indiana, recorded “Sophronia Alger,” so I have favored that version here.
11. Marriage Record, Sophronia Alger to Luther Bond, 14 September 1875, Marriage Licenses, Circuit Court, L:277, Wayne County, Indiana; Notice, The Cambridge City Tribune (Indiana) 11, no. 20 (September 16, 1875): 3.
12. Fern Alger Lamb, Reminiscence, June 1980, https://familysearch.org/photos/artifacts/6669520?p=54080594.
13. Brad Alger, Email to David Golding, 29 August 2025.
14. See Edwards, Autobiography, 26, 66, 76, 99.
15. “New American Books and Recent Importations,” Trübner’s American and Oriental Literary Record 8, nos. 1–2 (January 1, 1873): 4; “American Literature,” The Saturday Review of Politics, Literature, Science, and Art 43, no. 1113 (February 24, 1877): 243; Lebanon Daily News, 27 February 1888, p. 2; Buffalo Commercial, 8 October 1896, p. 11.
16. Compare United States federal censuses for variant spellings of Alger, Allgaier, and their relative phonetic transformations, especially for decades between 1830 and 1880.