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I am not surprised that Juda and Judah would occasionally turn up as female names in the 19th century as short forms or alterations of Judith.

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I do wonder, though, if early examples of women listed as "Jude" were being pronounced as one syllable or if that is just a spelling someone used for "Judy." Remember that census takers back then got the job as a political plum and were NOT chosen because they either hand good handwriting or good spelling. I have even seen many instances of census takers getting the sex of the person wrong, so they were often careless. And I have found that one really can't accept the data found from a search of the index to the census on a site like Ancestry.com without looking at the photocopy of the actual census records. The indexers themselves often looked at a census taker's handwriting from over a century ago and assimilated what they saw to a modern name they were familiar with, when if you look closely at the handwriting and pay attention to how other names on the page are written, one will often see that was not really what the census taker wrote down. I myself had a great-aunt whose full first and middle names were Alexandria Tennant (after a man named Alexander Tennant). She was often called Tennant in the family, and in one of the censuses she is in the indexer had her name as "Toussaint", as that's what he or she thought the bad handwriting of "Tennant" looked like.