This is part 1 of a 5-part series on improving your search skills.
Working on your search skills might not seem incredibly exciting, but you may be surprised at how much it can pay off.
Searching for digitized records is a foundational skill for all genealogists, but one that we sometimes assume we can't really improve upon. We know how to search for people in various repositories. We can type, fill out a form, scan search results for items that look promising. What more do you need? Contrary to what you may believe, your search skills can be honed just like any other tool in your research toolbox.
Get Wild
You don’t always have to search for exact names. In fact, sometimes the only thing standing between you and the record you seek is your perfect spelling. Why?
“Author” doesn’t mean “Authority”
Record authors did the best they could with what they had. Names that seem common now may have seemed foreign to record authors at the time. This is especially true when language barriers were present, such as in ship manifests for boats carrying European immigrants to the United States, or census enumerators encountering communities with different languages, dialects, or cultures than their own.
Spelling may not have been consistent at the time
English spelling became more or less standardized in the mid-1700s courtesy of Samuel Johnson and his Dictionary of the English Language. Swedish spelling, however, as an example, wasn’t standardized until the late 19th-to-early 20th century. Depending on where it’s at and when it’s at, your record could have any number of words–including names–that aren’t spelled as you would have expected them to be, and may be spelled differently between records.
Indexers aren’t perfect
Indexers don’t have the benefit (or bias) of the context of complimentary records that we have. They have to look through rows and rows of records to transcribe information, and they typically have little other than comparing letters against one another within the author's script. If you do see an error made in indexing, make sure to correct it or suggest an edit.
So how do we address these issues? You can use the wildcard “?” to stand for any single character or an asterisk (“*”) in place of a string of multiple characters when searching. Think about the name in question and determine which letters you think could be confused or interchanged with others, or omitted, and those that likely weren’t. For example, “y” and “i” are often interchangeable. Searching for a “Br?an” will give you results for “Bryan” and “Brian”. If your “Anne” could have variations, then “Ann*” will give you results for Ann/Anne/Annie/Annabelle and others.
Perhaps you’re thinking, “Yeah, but don’t the big sites already account for this? Don’t they cross-index their results?”
Want to find out?
Let’s take the name “Nehemiah” for example. Have you ever searched for a “Nehemiah”? You’re going to see a lot of variation in the 1700s and 1800s in the spelling. You might see “Neamiah,” “Nemiah,” “Niamiah,” etc. You may even see the avoidance of spelling all together where the person is listed as “N.” Let’s compare results between searching for “Nehemiah” vs. “N*m*ah.”
As you can see, “N*m*ah” yields 200+ additional records compared to specifically searching for “Nehemiah.”
So what do these additional records look like? Look below at a selection of records we see with our “Nehemiah” search:
Now look at the same section (from Nehemiah Previtt to Nehemiah Dobbins), and see the results in between we now see as well:
When we search for “N*m*ah,” we also get results for “Mamiah,” “Noamah,” and “Nemiah.” These three results were likely indexed incorrectly, misspelled by the enumerator, or simply spelled differently than you may have expected.
Although Ancestry may have given us results for a few alternatives to “Nehemiah,” our wildcard search was substantially more thorough.
Make sure to check out our next post in our Search Skills series, "The Card Catalog is Your Friend."
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