Wildcard searching

It’s important to remember that names are often misspelled or mis-transcribed, so doing “fuzzy” searching on names can often help you find a good match, even though the name may look wrong. In the name and keyword fields, you can do extremely fuzzy searches by using wildcards. Wildcards are special symbols (the asterisk "*" and the question mark "?") that are used in searching to represent some number of unknown letters in a word. Wildcards can be effective search tools if you are searching for words or names with alternate spellings:

An asterisk "*" represents zero or more characters (e.g., a search for "john*" might return "john, johnson, johnsen, johnathon, johns", etc.).

• Any use of the asterisk requires at least two non-wildcard characters (you cannot search for "S*", but could use "Sm*").
• A single character is represented by question mark "?" (e.g., "Sm?th" equals both "Smith" and Smyth").

I clipped that from Ancestry.com. It's a good description of how to use wild card searching.

It also helps to understand soundex and how the database you are using applies it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soundex

If you have an Ancestry.com account try this link: https://support.ancestry.com/s/article/Searching-with-Soundex

Mash Bjorklund
Clearwater, FL

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