Tuesday, March 11, 2014

Using Wild Cards

Did you know you can use "wild cards" in researching some of the genealogy sites? With Ancestry.com you can search by using two characters. The first one is "?" ( without the quotation marks ). This is great to use if your ancestor's last name could be spelled differently down the years like one of mine Weed, Weede Wede. Entering lets say Weed* or Weed? can bring up different results you might not have found.
Using the "*" to at the end will bring up different spelling like with the name Ann, Ann* ( Anne ) and so on.

When using Google search you can search by putting the persons name you are looking for in quotation marks like this:
"John Smith"
This way it won't just pull up "John" or everything with the name "Smith". You can even be more specific by Entering it this way:
"John Smith New York"
This also works with dates too. Even looking up obituaries.

So give it a try and see if this helps narrow down your searches.

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