Exact names or variants
There are many reasons why you may want to search for a possible variant of an ancestor's name.
- ❄ You may not know the exact details of the name.
- ❄ It may be a name that was commonly contracted (such as Jas for James)
- ❄ Your ancestor may have used different forms of the name (Patrick, Pat, Paddy)
- ❄ Some names are commonly mispelled by others (Cholmondley, Featherstonehaugh)
- ❄ Text extracted by Optical Character Recognition (OCR) often contains typos.
Most on-line search engines allow you to mark a tick box to show which type of search you require. But not all of them use the same conventions.