Surname alternatives

LegacyUser

VLR said: you need to look at how your program gives alternative surnames. I want the surname Sheward, often written as Showard, Soward, Shuard, etc., but your site keeps giving me Sugar, with none of the other alternatives. It is really annoying.

LegacyUser

Paul said: As with the position of having an email address (though I always forget it!) for requesting place name variants to be added to the Standards list, there should be a specific link to report surname variants.

There certainly used to be, and I was able to get RIPPON recognised as a variant of RIPON and likewise with RICKERBY and RICKABY. So whereas I had to undertake separate searches for each of these pairs of surnames, the FamilySearch algorithm does now include results for both pairs.

However, things are not always so straightforward - I believe I have found about 25 variants of THOBURN. In such cases - and possibly with examples like yours - the use of wildcards will probably work just as well in producing these variants - e.g.input SH*ARD or S*ARD, etc.

LegacyUser

Juli said: Last I checked, it still didn't realize that Nyiri is EXACTLY THE SAME as Nyiry... The problem is, what's true in one language may be exactly the opposite of what's true in another language. I think that's likely why they discontinued a suggestions mechanism for name variants: it was all just getting uselessly unwieldy.

(I have lots of suggestions for equivalents, starting with hyphen versus space versus one word all being, again, EXACTLY the same thing... I also have a non-equivalent: it considers Örzse [often indexed as Orzse] equivalent to Ursula, when in fact it's a form of Elizabeth.)

LegacyUser

VLR said: Thank you to all who replied with suggestions. I should certainly use the wild card more often. VLR