Why Can't I Find My Ancestor in the Index? Search Tricks That Work
Misspellings, misread handwriting and transcription errors hide millions of ancestors from name searches. Wildcards, Soundex, sideways searches and browsing will find most of them.
When a name search comes back empty, it's tempting to conclude your ancestor isn't in the record. More often, they're there, but the index doesn't match what you typed. Indexes are made by people and computers reading old handwriting, and errors are everywhere. Here's how to search around them.
Why names go missing
- Spelling wasn't fixed. Before the 20th century, names were spelled however the clerk heard them. Your Kuhn ancestor may be Coon, Koon, Kuehn or Cohn.
- Handwriting was misread. Capital letters like L and S, T and F, and I and J look alike in old scripts. "Lemuel" can become "Samuel."
- The informant didn't know. A neighbor or child may have given the census taker a nickname or a guess.
- Transcription errors. A tired indexer typed "Milles" for "Miller," or put the surname in the first-name box.
- The page was damaged or faint, and the indexer skipped it.
Search tricks
1. Search with less
Every extra field you fill in is another chance to miss. Start with a surname and a place, or a first name, birth year (plus or minus five) and birthplace, and add details only when you get too many results.
2. Use wildcards
Most genealogy sites accept wildcards: an asterisk (*) for any number of letters and a question mark (?) for one letter. Mill* finds Miller, Millar and Millard. Sm?th finds Smith and Smyth. Check each site's rules; some require at least a few letters before the wildcard.
3. Try Soundex and sounds-like searches
Soundex codes a surname by its sound: the first letter plus three digits. Smith, Smyth and Schmidt all share the code S530. Many sites offer a "sounds like" or Soundex option. The government used Soundex to index the 1880 through 1930 censuses, so it's built into many census tools.
4. Search sideways
If your ancestor won't turn up, search for someone else in the household with a rarer name: a wife named Philadelphia, a son named Zebulon. Or search for a known neighbor and look at the pages around them.
5. Leave the surname blank
Search for the first name, approximate birth year and birthplace, filtered to the county. If the surname was badly mangled, this finds the person anyway.
6. Search every site
The same census or record set is often indexed separately by Ancestry, FamilySearch, MyHeritage and others. Each index has different mistakes. A name that's garbled on one site may be perfect on another.
7. Think about how it was heard
Say the name out loud with your ancestor's accent. An Irish "Kearney" might be written "Carney." A German "Weiss" might be "Wise" or "Vice." A French "Thibodeaux" might be "Tebo." Write down every version you can think of and try them.
8. Watch for swapped names
Clerks sometimes recorded surname first, and indexers sometimes swapped them back incorrectly. Try searching "Miller" as a first name and "John" as a surname.
When searching fails, browse
For records organized by place, like censuses, city directories and tax lists, you can always go page by page. To browse a census:
- Find where your ancestor lived: the county, township or city ward.
- For 1880 and later, find the enumeration district (ED) for that address. Steve Morse's free One-Step tools can help convert addresses to EDs.
- Open the census images for that area and read every page.
It's slower, but it works, and you'll see the neighbors too.
Records that were never indexed
Many records have no name index at all. Search them by place in the FamilySearch catalog, or with full-text search. See Mastering the FamilySearch Catalog and Full-Text Search.
Report the errors you find
When you find your ancestor under a wrong spelling, most sites let you add a correction or an alternate name. It helps the next person searching, possibly a cousin.