wildcard

thomsos · Post by **thomsos** » Sun Oct 29, 2006 4:57 pm

If I use the wildcard with say the name 'Wil*', what names should this bring up?

thomsos

STUARTDALGLEISH · Post by **STUARTDALGLEISH** » Sun Oct 29, 2006 5:17 pm

Hi Thomsos,

Depending on what sites you are searching ,Wil* will produce allsort

Wilson
Wilkinson
Wilburn
Williamson
Will
Wilburn and on and on through the phonebook
Cheers

Stuart

thomsos · Post by **thomsos** » Sun Oct 29, 2006 5:22 pm

Thanks,
I am trying to find a death of a Williamson, pretty much exhausted everything else, wondered if it would be worth a try!

STUARTDALGLEISH · Post by **STUARTDALGLEISH** » Sun Oct 29, 2006 5:31 pm

Thomos

Have you tried something like Wil*ms*n
This will narrow down the search a little and then try others like Will*son etc

Cheers

Stuart

Post by **paddyscar** » Sun Oct 29, 2006 5:36 pm

First name or last?

William, Willard for first.

A few to start if it's a surname: wilson, wilton, williams, williamson, wilkerson, wilder, willett, wilder, wilding - a phone book would provide a ton more.

You can use more than one wild card to head in the right direction though.
Wil*m* would eliminate the Wilsons, but not Willmington or Williams

Wil*er would eliminate several options, as well, but open up others.

Wildcards are especially useful when spelling is uncertain as in Anders*n for either Anderson or Andersen. They can also act as a syllable for example Wil*s*n for either Wilkerson or Wilkerston

Post by **paddyscar** » Sun Oct 29, 2006 5:41 pm

thomsos wrote:Thanks,
I am trying to find a death of a Williamson, pretty much exhausted everything else, wondered if it would be worth a try!

Wil*ams*n might be worth a try. This would catch an indexing error, if someone missed the 'i' or one of the 'l's because of the similar letters all in a row.

thomsos · Post by **thomsos** » Sun Oct 29, 2006 5:49 pm

Hi,
It's a George Williamson.

It's not only me who is stumped by this one, I have had lots of help on TS, trying to find him, but we have all hit a brick wall, and that's saying something for this site, but I just keep going back to try and find out what happened to dear old ''George''

LesleyB · Post by **LesleyB** » Sun Oct 29, 2006 6:50 pm

Hmm...if its a George, have you tried variations on the firstname...it is often mistyped/transcribed as Goerge! Its a longshot, but maybe worth a try!

Best wishes
Lesley

thomsos · Post by **thomsos** » Mon Oct 30, 2006 3:49 pm

No luck,

tried every variation for both names.

Is there a way to check if he left the country? how would i go about trying to find this out.

DavidWW · Post by **DavidWW** » Mon Oct 30, 2006 5:33 pm

Note:

For surnames on www.scotlandspeople.gov.uk , if you want to ensure that your search covers likely spelling variations, then learn how to use wildcards, and, to be honest, forget the SOUNDEX option, - SOUNDEX might sometimes lead to useful hits, but much more often not, as well as quite often leading to numerous false hits.

Wildcards, on the other hand, in my general experience, will much more often lead to a solution, and, quite often, allow the demolition of a "brick wall".

On www.ScotlandsPeople.gov.uk, for given names, note the box beneath the given name entry, - "Return all forenames that begin with these characters", - my advice would be always but always to leave this box ticked, as is the default.

From the very beginning of ScotlandsPeople it was always the situation that any entry in the given name box had an implied wildcard, i.e. entering "J" would lead to any matches on the basis of "J*" (male or female unless otherwise selected as exclusively "male" or "female"), entering "JO" to any matches for "JO*", etc.

The "Return all forenames that begin with these characters" option is simply a formalisation of this situation.

(Note also that a leading wildcard is also permissible on ScotlandsPeople, just as long as there are two non-wildcard characters in the search term! - this wont work, however, if the number of results produced by the search term involved exceeds a certain, high limit, (around 1,000?) - in order to avoid too high a load on the system. Most often, such an outcome can be then avoided by adjusting the search criteria in terms of an adjustment in the wildcards used, the years searched, age where relevant, area searched, etc., etc.)

Note, however, that there are also many situations where an "internal" wildcard is still recommended for the given name, e.g. "Ma*g" (as long as the "Return all forenames that begin with these characters" is ticked this will lead to a search on the basis of "Ma*g*"), to ensure that Maggie, Margaret, and other cognates that fit this wildcard search term turn up in the list of matches; there's many other such !

A wee challenge

, can you come up with a wildcard search term that will produce hits for Betty as well as Eli[s/z]beth, combined with a reasonable number of hits

David