wild cards

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derekfrom france
Posts: 77
Joined: Mon Jul 24, 2006 5:21 pm
Location: FRANCE

wild cards

Post by derekfrom france » Fri Nov 24, 2006 9:38 pm

hi all
i have heard about wild cards could someone explain it to me i am looking for mccuskar what wild card searches could i use for this name
cheers derek
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Liz Turner
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Posts: 661
Joined: Tue Feb 14, 2006 11:28 pm
Location: Renfrewshire, Scotland

Post by Liz Turner » Fri Nov 24, 2006 9:51 pm

Hi Derek

There's a variety of information on TS about wildcards and using them. Start off with this post:-

http://talkingscot.com/forum/viewtopic. ... =wildcards

But you'll find more info if you click the search button at the top of the page and the type "wildcard" into the search box.

Good luck

Liz
Fife: Nicolson, Cornfoot, Walker, Gibson, Balsillie, Galt, Elder
NE Scot: Nicolson, Lindsay, Haliburton, Ross
Edin & Central: Nicolson, Blaikie, Stevenson, Ross, Hotchkiss, Suttie, Christie, Clelland, Gray, Purvis, Lang, Dickson
Ross & Cromarty: Ross

DavidWW
Posts: 5057
Joined: Sat Dec 11, 2004 9:47 pm

Post by DavidWW » Sat Nov 25, 2006 12:45 pm

And this, lifted from another thread.................

There's two general techniques with wildcards.

The one I would normally start with is to use a wildcard where I suspect that there may be/may not be a double letter, a variation in the vowel, a trailing "s" etc., in other words, retaining the sounds that I'd expect to see survive. Included here would be designing the wildcard search to take account of known spelling variations, e.g. THOM*SON for THOMPSON/THOMSON, or HARD* for HARDY/HARDIE, etc., etc.. Sometimes separate searches are required to cover all the possibilities.

And, always but always, never just MC or MAC, but M*C

In this case I'd have started off with CROS*N, and moved on to CR*S*N if the first approach didn't work, maybe also sticking on a wildcard at the end which is generally worth a go unless it leads to too great a number of hits, i.e. CROS*N* and CR*S*N* .

If that fails, then, as here, I've quite often had success by chopping off the end of the name, - as here CROSS* or CROS*.

Remember as well that SP is one of the few sites where a leading wildcard is allowed, so that the reverse can be searched. In this case, had all else failed, I'd probably have given *OSSAN and similar a go !

I've ended up in my examples using * only, but ? is also useful, e.g. RE?D, rather than REID or READ ...........

David