A deceased cousin of mine has traced the Arp ancestry back to the 1700's so the story of the name change from Earp to Arp is not completely true. There could be a branch of the Arp Family that stemmed from Earp but not the entire family. THe way I heard the name change took place was that on a deed to some land in Monroe County Tennessee the "E" was inadvertantly left off of the spelling of the name and since it was a legal document, the spelling was left ARP. This also could be partly true for a certain brance of the family. However the name has been traced back to Germany and I doubt if Wyatt Earp was a lae man there.