Some of us with unique first or last names may be used to others misspelling them or mispronouncing them. If you are researching your family history, it is important to keep this in mind as you do your record searches. From census takers to immigration officials, humans have played a role in the recording of the documents that we rely on for genealogical research. Some records have been transcribed so that they are searchable on the internet, which is great, but it is important to remember that the transcribing of those records was done by; you guessed it, another human.
Some brick walls in genealogy research are encountered because of human error, most likely misspelling. To compound the issue, the spelling of a family’s surname may have changed over time from Dailey to Daily, for example, or may have been “Anglicized” when the family came to America. Some searchable databases have a built-in way of helping researchers to avoid the confusion that can arise when an ancestor’s name is not spelled in the records as the researcher is searching for it.
Soundex is an indexing system that groups similarly sounding names together do that when you search for a surname, say Daily, all of the variants of that surname appear – Daley, Daly, Dailey, and so on. This increases the chance that your search will turn up the record that you are looking for. Unfortunately, not all record indexes use Soundex, so a little more effort is required from the researcher to get around a spelling discrepancy. If you run into this situation, try spelling the surname in different ways, or if there is a box near the “search” box that you can check or uncheck for exact spelling, be sure to uncheck it. Be especially careful if the name that you are searching involves an O’ or a Mc, as the O’ or Mc may have been lost in transcription.