Fuchs and Fux
The church records for Bucovina and also the current Czech republic use these names interchangeably. If I search for "Fuchs", entries with the "Fux" spelling do not appear in the results. For example in the original church records, Andreas Fuchs is written 'Fuchs' on some records, and 'Fux' on others. Can something be done maybe with the Soundex? Help!
Best Answer
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Although it can be frustrating when the automated matching doesn't work as you hope, you can always specify alternate names for the search criteria. If you specify Fuchs in the primary name and Fix as an alternate name, you should see search results for both spellings.
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There are many, many such frustrating examples.
Nyiri is not a match to Nyiry, despite the fact that they are Exactly The Same Name. It is, however, a match to Nyári, a completely different name. (Ditto for Nayer, Néré, Neer, Near, Knier, McNair, Niere, Neier, ....)
In Hungarian, 'c' is the newer way to spell 'cz'. The changeover basically coincides with WWI: before it, almost everyone still used 'cz', both in names like Ferencz "Frank, Francis" and in words like nyolcz "eight". After the war, almost everyone had switched to using 'c': Ferenc, nyolc. But despite this complete and perfect equivalence between Ferencz and Ferenc, FS's search algorithms will not show you any result that spells it Ferencz if you searched for Ferenc, and vice versa. Not a single one.
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@Alan E. Brown, that only applies if you're searching in the Family Tree. All of my examples are based on searching in historical records, and I believe that's where the original poster was searching as well, based on the mention of church records.
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@Julia Szent-Györgyi , actually I was indeed talking about searching historical records. Among the options available where you specify the name of the person you are searching for in records is the ALTERNATE NAME option:
When you choose that, an additional pair of name field appears, where you can specify an alternate name:
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Alan, thanks for pointing that out. I'm accustomed to resorting to wildcards; I suppose I'm just being petulant, but I have a philosophical objection to entering an Exact Equivalent as an alternate name. It's like needing to enter "Joannes" as an alternate for "Johannes" (which is not actually the case, thank goodness).
It just bugs me that I need to spoon-feed Nyiri and Nyiry to it, but it spits out totally-guaranteed-irrelevant things like McNair. Or that I need to get creative about Algatzy/Algatzi/Algaczy/Algaczi (etc.) -- which are all representations of exactly the same sounds/name -- but it comes up with utter nonsense like Dalgieish, Olgcaty, Dalgelis, and D'Algoot, in the first 10 results. Yeah, I know, the algorithm needs to work in many languages at once, which is an impossible requirement, but there's gotta be a better way.
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Thank you, Allen. That solution is so apparent I totally overlooked it. 😁
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