Need a search hint
Answers
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I, too, would like to hear if there is a straightforward way of using wildcards with search engines, as I don't seem to get satisfactory results when I use them in a search.
Not so with FamilySearch, where I would not usually recommend a last name "*man" search, as you would get far too many results. But I would use it in separate searches with these first names - particularly Iphigenia, Phillipina and even Magdalena, as the combination of those names with *man must be much rarer. (I will try out shortly). For this, and similar types of search, I would initially mark all fields as "Exact" (definitely the last name one - *man), as well as the year range and possibly Chicago - in the form of "Chicago*". As the first names (well, 2 or 3 of them) are fairly unusual, if you get no results I would go on to use wildcards when inputting them - e.g. "ph*l*p*na", as the name could be spelled with different vowels, or two "Ls", or one "P"!
In short, I don't think there is any easy way of finding all four sisters with one search. A search with the parents' names (leaving the "child's" first name, and possibly last name, blank) is another alternative. It has taken me a long time to find search strategies that can lead to positive results in finding records of "elusive" relatives. The use of wildcards has nearly always been necessary - as has a lot of imagination over how a name might have been recorded hundreds of years ago - or transcribed rather more recently.
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As an example, I just carried out a FamilySearch search for (any) "Iphigenia *man". There were just 17 results, checking the "Exact" boxes, none of which immediately appear useful to you, I'm afraid. But, using the dates and place you mention, produces 0 results, though 7 if you just input a date range (no place).
Hopefully, other Community contributors will have further strategies to suggest.
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Such flexible, multi-field search interfaces do exist (for example for the digital State Library of Upper Austria), but I don't know of one that would be relevant to Chicago in the later half of the 1800s.
On FamilySearch and similar sites, you're stuck doing multiple searches, which is basically a longer way of achieving what you'd get from a multi-person search set to a logical "or". The only way you can get that narrowed down to a logical "and" is by hand -- but given the dearth of relevant results in Paul's searches, it's kind of a moot point: zero plus zero is still zero, whether you're including only the intersection or the full set.
Specifically for FamilySearch, I recommend not using the "exact" box on given names. There are several reasons for this. One, the algorithm is pretty good at some name equivalents: searching for Miklos brings up Nicholas, too. (But it's sometimes kind of dumb: it doesn't think Ferencz matches Ferenc, even though they're Exactly The Same Thing.) Testing it just now, Philippina matches Philip and Philippine and Philepine (and presumably also Philippa). You may argue that you don't want to see all those guys named Philip, but that brings me to another reason not to mark given names as exact: unusual names are especially likely to be misrecorded and misindexed. A census enumerator unfamiliar with his Greek myths, hearing /if-ih-gin-EYE-uh/, could have written something like Ifijineya, and even if he got corrected, an indexer a century later, likewise unfamiliar with Greek myths, could look at his "Iphigenia" and transcribe it as Jiluperna. (Made-up example, but based on actual misreadings.) For a name like Philippina, where the feminine versions are rare but the masculine name is common, you have to also look at the records that are indexed as male, because either the record or the index could have changed the uncommon into the common.
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Hi Paul and Julia ! Thank you so much for your suggestions. I will try to hammer at it with name variations as suggested. Yes, the Iphigenia one seems to be rather tricky since I don't know what Americanized version she might have used. It is quite a long shot of a lost family-branch puzzle that's been bugging me for the last 30yrs. I am told, those family members (the sisters) were contacted via Red Cross in 1937 by Anna (the one that left for Greece) and they responded with a letter and a photo, but the response was destroyed in a fire and RedCross no longer keeps the records.
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