If you were to choose an alias, you wouldn't choose one which sounded so close to your real name, would you, but he did. The reason that I know that the name of Mosheim wasn't a spelling mistake is because in the old records the name of Motion and Mosheim are in the same sentence and the records clearly say that Alexander was using the name of Mosheim as an alias. The very fact that Motion and Mosheim appear in the same sentence proves that Mosheim wasn't a spelling mistake.

However it does pose one question and that is this, how did Alexander believe that Mosheim was the original name. One possible clue to this is his occupation, he was a Fisherman, so it is quite possible that he came, into contact with foreign Fishermen and perhaps he was told that this was the original name by these foreign Fishermen. I really don't know but it is a possibility I suppose. Alexander was born a Motion, married as a Motion and died as a Motion and it is only in the early 1800s that he starts to use the name of Mosheim and then even he stops using it after a while.

People have looked at these variants to our name in Scotland and have tried to find a link with them and France, however I believe that they were making a simple mistake. Instead of looking in Scotland for a variant of our name and then seeing if it could be traced back to France, they should have been looking in France or a French speaking country for a name which has Motion as one of it's variants. This is precisely what I have found.

Remember back on Page 2, I mentioned that there was Motions in Quebec in the 1600s. It is with them that I have found that the name of Motion was a variant of their original French name.

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