Because names in historical records are sometimes misspelled or abbreviated, searching for spelling variations can help you find records you may otherwise miss.
Names found on original records
Names are indexed as they appeared on original documents, even when the document contains abbreviations or apparent errors. Try searching for variations and abbreviations. For example, the name James Bruny may appear in records as Jim, Jas., Jimmy, J, Bruny, Bruney, and so forth.
Using Soundex
When searching for name abbreviations and variations, it's useful to take into account spelling variations or errors recorded by the original record-takers or indexers of documents. Soundex is designed to display results for all names that have similar pronunciations. See our article on Searching with Soundex for more information.
Wildcard searching
Wild cards are special symbols used in searches to represent unknown letters in a word. Ancestry® uses the asterisk (*) and the question mark (?) as wild cards. If you didn’t know, for example, whether a certain last name were spelled “Nielson” or “Nielsen,” you could do a search for the name using a wild card where the unknown letter goes: “Niels?n.”
The * represents zero to five characters, while the ? represents one character. Wild cards do not work with Soundex matches. When searching with wild cards, at least the first or last character must not be a wild card, and all searches containing wild cards must contain at least three non-wild card letters. For example, though searching “*ohnson” and “Johnso*” would work, “*ohnso*” would not; and while “*ill” would work, “*ll” would not.
Wild cards can be used in various ways.
Reporting spelling errors
If a spelling error is in the original document, it can't be corrected, but you can alternate information. Adding alternate information helps people searching with the right spelling to find the document. If the original document is right, but there's an error in the transcription, you can report the error to us. See Correcting a Record.
