Jno in census reports?

Question

typo for Jon or an abbreviation for something else? I thought it was a typo but I'm seeing a lot of it.

Answer 1

I would say it should have been an abbreviation for the name "John" .

Answer 2

It's not a typo. That was actually the abbreviation for Jonathan in the 18th and 19th centuries. If you go into a census index and type that in, you'll get many thousand results.

Answer 3

dear

jon abbreviation of jonath...

Answer 4

It's not necessarily Jonathan.   My husbands great grandfather was named John and the abbreviation Jno is associated  with him several times.  With that said:

It is a formerly used abbreviation for the Latin “Joannes” was “Jno.,” one letter shorter than the English version “John.”

Wikipedia says :

Another noteworthy addition would be about the abbreviation "Jno." earlier just "Jno", really a corruption of "Jn." with the period drawn circularly to look like a small "o". Amateur genealogists very frequently mistake this for an abbreviation of "Jonathan", but it is really short for "John", a difference that can be quite significant, since it was very common in the 1800s and earlier (characterized by what we'd today consider substandard recordkeeping) to have sons/brothers named both John and Jonathan, often several generations of these pairs in a row.

Answer 5

It can be short for "Jonathan".

"Jas" is sometimes short for "James".

Wm, of course, is William.