Two mementos from my grandfather SHERMAN LINN SHAW II's grade school years have been preserved among the many papers and photographs that I inherited from my grandparents. One of them is a Perfect Attendance certificate for the month of November 1925. The certificate shows that my grandfather was then a pupil of Miss Sarah E. Dishong at Lee Center Grade School, and that Lee County's superintendent of public schools was Mr. L. W. Miller. The other item is my grandfather's eighth-grade diploma, also signed by Miss Dishong and Mr. Miller, showing that he graduated from the eighth grade on 31 May 1926. I found the Perfect Attendance certificate interleaved with the diploma.
The other notable thing about these mementos is that both of them spell my grandfather's middle name with a "y," rather than an "i" as his birth record and almost every other document show. In fact, in all of the papers and records pertaining to my grandfather's grade school and high school education, his middle name is always spelled "Lynn" rather than "Linn." It is unclear to me what accounts for this difference in spelling. On the one hand, it is known that our Linn ancestors originally spelled their surname indiscriminately as "Linn" or "Lynn," and then in the 1800s and early 1900s, different branches of the Linn family settled on one spelling or the other. Could it be that when my grandfather was a child, he varied the spelling of his middle name from time to time? Or, because he and his father had the same name, did he perhaps opt for the "Lynn" spelling in those years as a way of distinguishing his name from his father's? Or was it simply that the school had initially misspelled his middle name, and persisted with the misspelling throughout his grade school and high school years?
The Perfect Attendance certificate and eighth grade diploma are shown below. The Perfect Attendance certificate had been enlarged to make it easier to read.
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