Scotlands People Search Tips
Genealogy Research Aids
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Search Tips - how to affectively search at ScotlandsPeople ScotlandsPeople.
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Just one tip so far: (from an email I sent out) How To Use Their Wild Card Searches Navigating scotlandspeople is easy to do. The one thing you need to know is how to search when you expect different spellings of a name. Here are some tips on how to use their wild card searches. ? means mystery letter- can be put anywhere in a name. * means more letters unknown- can be put at the end of a name. examples: Sm?th = Smyth, Smith, Smeth Sm?t* = Smyth, Smith, Smeth, Smythe, Smitty etc.. If your searching Mitchell, as I do a lot, I use M?tch?l* = Metchal, Mitchall, Mitchelle etc. An interesting one is when I search Weir. Most of the time I can bet that the ie-ei are inverted. If I just search Weir, I just get Weir and visa versa. I can take care of this in once search by searching this: W??r = Wier, Weir, wear etc... Lets not forget Robbertson. Robbert* = Robbertsone, Robbertsoune etc.. The hard part is getting past the fact that they might not have doubled up the bb. In this case I use Rob* but that returns a great amount of records, so be sure you use a good first name. You can also use this on first names to. I do it a lot when searching a first name James as we know it could be spelled Jas Ja* Sm?t* could be James Smythe, Jas Smith or even Jane Smitty, so be aware of how you search to get the best returns. I know your ancestors probably usually used one spelling. But they were at the mercy of the clerks a lot of the time. I hope my tips have helped. I use scotlandspeople a lot. At first I shied away because it was a pay site, but I have really had great luck there. And the cost is reasonable. http://www.scotlandspeople.gov.uk/ Tammy Mowat Family International http://www.tammymitchell.com/clanmowat/international/ |
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