Surname alternatives
LegacyUser
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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.
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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.0 -
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.)0 -
VLR said: Thank you to all who replied with suggestions. I should certainly use the wild card more often. VLR0