Genealogy Chat

Just read in a thread about using a wild card. Sorry for ignorance how do you go about this please? Thanks Sunny

Wild cards are characters which you can insert instead of normal letters or numbers. For instance, you might be searching for TAYLOR, but not sure how it will be spelled in the particular database, so you might put TA?LOR (a ? replaces a single character) to pick up TAYLOR and TAILOR. In the same way, you can use a * - but that replaces an indefinite number of characters, so COC* would pick up COCKS, but also COCKINGTON; CHRIS* would pick up CHRISTINE, CHRISTIAN, CHRISTOPHER... Using wildcards can also be a way of getting round some of the likely mis-transcriptions! Christine

Thanks Christine. Will try it for my elusive rellies, really born under a gooseberry bush. Sunny LOL

Does it work for name endings too? For example, if I wanted to find a name that I knew ended in ....ton, could I put *ton to get Warrington, Torrington, Hampton etc?

How they are allowed to work in a particular database will depend on how it's set up. Ancestry, for instance, requires not less than three characters before a wildcard, so you can't start with just one. Kent BMD's marriage search doesn't exactly have wildcards, but it allows you to use the 'not sure'-button to search for any string of characters in a surname, so COCK would pick up not only COCKS and COCKERTON, but also HANCOCK and WILCOCKS etc. Amazingly, they allow you to search on a single letter - and that enabled me to find a marriage-match when I had the full name of the groom (and had found his ref) by using just the bride's first name & the initial of middle name plus a single letter in the mandatory surname field! It came up very quickly because, although her surname started with L, it had an A in it! Christine

I don't know any system that will search without at least one initial letter, which is a real nuisance because many mistranscriptions I have are incorrect due to inability of people to write without very florid initial letters, and transcribers unable to make sense of it. So I wouldn't have found my Smoothys as Lenorthey or Timothy, nor my Moore as Thorne, or my grandfather Jeuel Gray as Denel Gray. Luckily I found my Jeuel Gray (v. unusual name, so I thought I'd get him first go) by searching on surname, age and place of birth - luckily for me, a small Norfolk village called Limpenhoe. I got Jeuel/Denel and his brother Lemuel/Leonard, but his brother Sam was down as born Limperhoe and John as born Limperhal !!! nell