Daily AncestorEvery way to spell a surname
List every spelling of one family surname that you have seen or can imagine, code each one in Soundex, and search again with the variants you have not tried.
Clerks wrote names as they heard them. Many 'missing' ancestors are sitting in an index under a spelling nobody thought to try.
Your steps this week
- Write down every spelling from your own records, then add ones that sound the same when spoken aloud.
- Run each through the Soundex calculator and group them by code.
- Notice which spellings share a code and which do not, because some indexes group by code and some do not.
- Search one free index again with each spelling that falls outside your usual one.
- Keep a list of variants in your notes for the whole family.