What CKE says is so true. For instance, I have found seventeenth-century babies christened Tace given as
Tracey by modern transcribers, and babies named
Georgina in Victorian Britain transcribed as
Georgia. The only babies in Victorian Britain actually named
Georgia turned out to be the daughters of Greek parents. What did surprise me, though, was to find that eighteenth-century babies recorded by transcribers as
Melody really were named
Melody, a name I would have thought was coined in the 20th century.