Soundex

[morgano]

Hello, again.

I have been investigating McLarens a lot lately and have just found a lot of OPRs that are for the name "McLeran". I found these by a roundabout route: having failed to find records for a Thomas McLaren, I looked for his wife, Marjorie McLauchlan, and found May McLauchlan, married to Thomas McLeran. There are dozens more McLerans found for the same parish and period. If I search with Soundex on for "McLaren", I get no hits for "McLeran", but there is no doubt that, in the parish I am researching, OPRs consistently, for some years, recorded as "McLeran" the name that we would now record as "McLaren", or "MacLaren". The fault is not with those who created the records, but with the way Soundex is set up in SP.
"McLeran" is evidently a variant of "McLaren", but does not get found by searches with Soundex on. If, on the other hand, I search with Soundex on for, say, "Maxwell", surely the hardest Scottish surname to spell incorrectly, I get "McAll", "Macauley", "MacColl", "McColl" and "MacNeill" - fine names, but not ones that anyone in the real world would confuse with "Maxwell".
Clearly, I might have tracked down the McLerans faster, if I had used wild cards, but I don't think I should have needed to, in this instance.
So the moral is: if you're looking for McLarens (or MacLarens), don't forget to look for McLerans, too.



Morgano

[SarahND]

Hi Morgano,
On Ancestry a Soundex search for McLaren will also bring up
McLeran, McLerran (and all sorts of irrelevant names...). In theory, Soundex is supposed to ignore the vowels and only go by the structure of the consonants in the name. So it should look for names that have m c l r n with anything or nothing in between. However, it only looks for the initial letter, in this case M and then the three subsequent consonanants , so you also get McLeer, McLeroy, etc. with no n at the end. I never search Soundex for any Mc name, because it gets w-a-y too many irrelevant hits (at least on Ancestry). Not sure why it is behaving differently on SP.

All the best,
Sarah

[LesleyB]

Hi Morgano
There is a quick way of finding out what names within a group Soundex includes, and what it does not include:
http://resources.rootsweb.ancestry.com/ ... xconverter

Soundex Code for mclaren = M246
Other surnames sharing this Soundex Code:
MACLAREN | MCALEER | MCCLARY | MCCLEARY | MCCLEERY | MCCLURE | MCCLURG | MCCLURKIN | MCELROY | MCELROYS | MCKELLAR | MCLAREN | MCLARTY | MCLURE | MESLER | MISCHLER | MISHLER | MOCKLER | MUCKLEROY | MYSELLERS |

Soundex as a system is not that great in my opinion. I never use it. Careful use of wildcards will in almsot all cases always be a better way to cover any likely variiatons on a name.

Best wishes
Lesley

[SarahND]

Soundex as a system is not that great in my opinion. I never use it. Careful use of wildcards will in almsot all cases always be a better way to cover any likely variiatons on a name.

I heartily agree that it is not a great system and doesn't catch some very common variants of names. On SP, where you can use * and ? to your heart's content, I don't use Soundex. On Ancestry I'm often forced to, since it will only allow very limited use of wildcards.

Regards,
Sarah

[morgano]

Thanks for the replies. I think LesleyB's list proves my point (and LesleyB's) about Soundex; I don't see McLeran there. Ancestry's application of Soundex doesn't really help in this context, because the records are all back in the eighteenth century.

Having said that, I did manage to find via Ancestry an ancestor of mine who was impossible to track down in SP: "Cathne Maxwell", Dundee, 1871 Census. "Maxwell" is just about the only word on the page that is clearly legible, but SP won't find it. I found Catherine Maxwell in SP only by searching on the name of one of her fellow-lodgers, Ann "Reenan". Through some glitch of the search engine, or of the database, my great-great-grandmother seems to be forever, for SP, an unperson, as far as that census is concerned. Likewise, the Irish sisters who were her neighbours have entered digital immortality as "Reenan", but that, surely, is itself a mis-reading of "Keenan".


Morgano

[JustJean]

Hi Morgano

You didn't mention if you had taken the further step to converse with GROS and SP about the apparent absence of your ancestor in the census index or the mis-indexing of the Keenan/Reenan sisters. While they don't always get things right the first time....they are keen to work on corrections to the database. There are periodic (albeit sometimes long periodic) corrections made to the SP indexes. Please do use a contact form to request a correction be put on their "to do" list. If excessive credits have been spent in your non-finding process it's not a bad idea to mention this as well.

Best wishese
Jean

[SarahND]

Hi Jean,

Best wishese

Is that a new kind of politeness language? Sorry, couldn't resist...

I second your suggestion to contact SP-- they are very gracious about correcting mis-transcriptions in the index, and refunding credits when it has caused you to spend too many...

yours speaking "all the bestese" (another dialect),
Sarah

[LesleyB]

Hi Sarah
I'm no better...my fingers are always lagging behind my brain:

Careful use of wildcards will in almsot all cases always be a better way to cover any likely variiatons on a name.

That sentence could do with a few wildcards just to cover the word variations!!


Best wishes
Lesley

[SarahND]

almsot

I thought you were just referring to a small almshouse

Sorry, I'm a wee bit slap-happy from working outside in the hot sun "mad dogs and Englishmen..." (should be, in my case, "mad dogs and people with too much English ancestry")

Sarah (woof!)

[morgano]

Yes, I should contact SP. Just out of interest, I had a look for the Reenan/Keenan sisters in the 1881 census and there is an Ann Keenan (as transcribed, that is), whose younger sister, Catherine, is now Mrs McCafferty, which seems rather apt.