Go Wild!

Spelling variations are the most common cause of brick walls in our research

We use wildcards to hone in on troublesome surname spellings. Sometimes a census enumerator or indexer has misread a single letter, or it might be that your ancestor wasn’t consistent with how they spelled their own name. Substituting part of the name for ‘*’ or ‘?’ helps to broaden the search. For example, ‘Col*man’ will locate results for ‘Colman’, ‘Coleman’ and ‘Collman’.

Blankety Blank Try leaving the first name or surname search box blank if a wildcard search doesn’t do the trick. Entering all of the other information you know about a person can be just as useful.