By Gena Philibert Ortega
Consistency in spelling is a more modern concern, and when searching for ancestors, it is not unusual to have an ancestor whose name is spelled a variety of ways by himself and by others.
So how do you find someone whose name seems to change every time they write it? How do you even figure out what the variations are?
• Think like a 3rd grader. One way to figure out some possible spelling variations is to get help from someone who sounds everything out phonetically, a 3rd grader. Ask a child how they would spell a certain name. You may be surprised at some of the ways they think it is spelled. Kids don’t have our adult brain that tells us that a certain spelling is wrong. If you don’t have a child handy to help you, just sit down with a piece of paper and start playing with ideas about how a surname could have been spelled. Consider different vowel combination and extra consonants that may have been thrown in.
• Try using wildcards to catch additional spellings of a surname. Most search engines, including WorldVitalRecords, allow for wildcard searches. How this works, is it allows you to substitute a symbol (usually an asterisk *) for a letter or letters. On WorldVitalRecords, you can type in the first 3 letters of a first name or a surname and then place a *. This will help you add more results than just typing the name as you “know” it should be spelled. An example would be my surname of Philibert. When searching in WorldVitalRecords you could type in Phi*, this could help you to get hits that would spell my surname as Philbert or Philabert. In using the wildcard for a first name it may help in picking up different versions of a first name like Mar* would look for Maria, Mary, Marie, Marisol, etc. One way you can use a wildcard when you search Google is by placing a wildcard in the middle of the name like John * Jones. This tells Google that you want to find results that may include something in the middle of John and Jones, like an initial or a middle name.
• Consider the way a surname could have been indexed. Many problems exist when you take a document and ask people (or even computers) to index them. One problem that can come up is how the person interprets the last name. I’ve seen times when a surname has a prefix of Van that the Van part of the surname is indexed as a middle name. So the surname is indexed as only the part that comes after Van. This can also happen with names that start with Mc or Mac. This is why it’s important to be open to lots of ways a name could be interpreted not just when it was originally written but years later when it is indexed onto a genealogical database.
• If a Soundex search is available, use it. A Soundex feature allows you to search surnames that sound like the surname that you are searching. This is especially helpful in looking through lists where a surname might be spelled a number of ways. Soundex doesn’t rely on how the name is spelled, it’s a system that codes names based on how they sound. In the case of Johnson, it doesn’t matter whether it is spelled Johnsen, Johnson, or Johnsan, you will be able to find it. In the case of WorldVitalRecords you can use a Soundex search and a Double Metaphone search. For more information about these two search methods, click here .
