Getting Creative with Surnames
There are many creative ways to find alternate surname variations, but I also wanted to share an online tool that I find handy for this purpose. British Origins, one of the sites I use in my English research, employs a name search technology known as NameX. Created by Image Partners, NameX is based on a Last name thesaurus containg 75 million entries for 1.5 million distinct last names and a First name thesaurus containing over 3 million entries for 260,000 distinct first names. This generally results in fewer, more accurate name variants than Soundex. For example, while NameX identifies 21 highly plausible variants for the surname Owens, Soundex identifies 659 "variants," of which nearly 90% are extremely unlikely (eg. Oyoumick, Ounnoughi, Onehawk). NameX does miss a few likely ones, of course, such as Owins, but it also provides a much more reasonable number of surnames to wade through than Soundex.
I find the First Name Thesaurus to be of particular help, since Soundex doesn't address this, and many genealogy databases don't offer anything other than wildcard searching for first names. A search for Kimberly brings up some great variations, including Kim, Kimberley, Kymberly and Kimberlee.
The NameX name matching technology is sold to companies, but the Surname Thesaurus and Forename Thesaurus are both available on the Web, and can be freely accessed for personal use. A great resource the next time you need some help getting your creative juices flowing!
Comments
I, too, have problems with both the census taker and transcriber. Vowel substitutes don’t help much when there’s an open “A” and a sqeezed down ending–”OLINSTEND” for”ALMSTEDT”, St. Louis, MO, 1870.
Thank you for the article and recommendation of the “Surname Thesaurus.” After attending a program planned by the Dallas Genealogical Society, abt. 1995,(where the speaker, Desmond W. Allen, had us repeat many times, “Spelling doesn’t count”), I came home and eventually collected about 45 ways to spell my MIERS maiden name. With these spellings, I was able to find my Miers family on the 1850, 1860, 1870, 1880 census’; spelled a different way on each one.
Keep up the good work. Your articles are always interesting and helpful.
I have developed a computer program for the genealogy community which takes into account the different spellings of surnames. This program, which runs under the Windows operating system, is intended to assist you in searching the web for information on your surnames.
I call this program “Surname Suggestion List”. After you enter in your
surname, you click on the Search button, and it will create 3 lists of
similar sounding surnames. The lists are based on how good a sound match
the other surnames are to the one you entered.
I encourage you to give the program a try. It is available at: http://home.triad.rr.com/combsfamily/sslmain.html
Thanks,
Matt Combs
Lewisville, NC