[APG Public List] Ancestry.com searches

[Pat Asher]

At 08:52 PM 12/3/2009, Kathryn S. Black wrote:
>Just because Ancestry set up their search engine to take 3 letters 
>and *then* the wild card doesn't mean that everybody did it the same way.
>
>Findmypast.com (a British site that has the census & more) lets you 
>put the wild card anywhere in either the given or surname.  It's 
>*so* nice to be able to ask for Susan *kett.

I often wish for the ability to enter a leading wild card too, 
especially when holographic letters are often difficult to 
distinguish, e.g. G for D or S for L.

OTOH, I'm not sure there is any perfect solution when it comes to 
search engines.  Last week I was looking for Ada ANTRIM, and finally 
found her as A. L. ANHIM.  The cross bar in the T had faded and the 
name was quite reasonably indexed as ANHIM.

While ANTRIM often appears as ANTRUM, neither soundex nor wild cards 
would have helped in this case, unless I knew exactly how it had been 
indexed.  I ended up slogging my way through all the females of the 
right age (plus or minus 5 years) in the county.  Fortunately, it was 
a rural county in 1880 so there were only a few hundred entries <g>

Pat Asher