Search Nikolai doesn't find Necolai

LegacyUser

Jim Redd said: I am researching my wife's ancestors in the village of Banyliv, Bukowina, Austria between 1840 and 1900. The spelling of names is quite variable often with Cyrillic letters and Roman letters mixed in the same name. The search algorithms are pretty good about finding different spellings, but I have discovered an exception, and wonder if you can tweak the search algorithm?
When I search for Nikolai Ostashek LR74-7LS, he would not show up in the search results because the first source that I found for him was spelled Неколаій that was romanized to Nekolai. If I searched for Nekolai, he was the first search result.
I think I have created duplicates that I later had to merge because of this kind of problem --For example, I am quite sure that I have already entered a parent, but can't find him by searching, so I add the new child and new parent only to later have to merge them.
I don't have the same problem with Ekaterina Ekaterena and other names, but Nikolai Nekolai seems to be a problem. I even think Nicolai doesn't cause problems, but I haven't monitored it closely.
I do notice that when searching for the surname Nekula it does include Nikula that is another spelling for this surname. Why doesn't Nikolai??

LegacyUser

Tom Huber said: Hi Jim,

This issue can be quite a problem, especially when more than one alphabet is used.

As to spelling variations -- those are common prior to when governments started mandating consistent spellings within their structure. For the United States, the Social Security program is a good example. In addition, many of our ancestral relatives were not literate and could not read well enough to know if someone who recorded their information made an error in spelling their name. (I suspect you know all this, but I included this for those who are not familiar with what has happened over the centuries.)

Getting to your particular issue, make sure that spelling variations are included in a person's record as alternate names. This is especially true for names that are not anglo-saxon in nature where the search routines are set up to handle variations on names like Smith (Smyth, Smythee, etc), Clark (Clarke, etc.), and so on.

Hopefully, this helps.