[APG Public List] Ancestry.com searches

[Pat Asher]

At 09:54 AM 12/4/2009, Ray Beere Johnson II wrote:
>In _any_ research situation, with the possible variables in our own 
>knowledge, what we might need to seek, and the possible errors in 
>recording, transcribing, and indexing the records, the wider the 
>range of options, the more likely it is a search will succeed with 
>minimal effort.

Agreed.

But while we can always hope, I never expect my research to be easy <g>

However, I did a test just now and found that "an?*m" worked in 
Ancestry searches.

The ? represents a single unknown letter, then the * represents any 
number of unknown characters preceding the "m".

Since "um" is sometimes misread as "nn", I tried "an?*", but the 
series is rejected without a following letter.  OTOH, it will accept 
"a*im", so there is a little more flexibility than I thought.

Pat