Here’s the next in my occasional series of bite-size Quick Tips. Click on the Quick Tips tag for my other Quick Tips. Because I tend to write longer posts, I wanted to provide a quick-to-read (and quick-to-write) post every couple of weeks on a small topic that pops into my head. This one might be helpful when you dive into the 1950 census.
Brainstorm variations of your ancestors’ names
With the release of the 1950 U.S. census less than two weeks away, now seems like a good time to suggest that you take a moment to come up with alternative ways your ancestors’ names may have been spelled–or interpreted by indexers–on documents. Once you have your list, you can use the different variants when searching at the various online site, like Ancestry, Family Search, the NARA 1950 census site, MyHeritage, and Newspapers.com.
Variations might include:
- First and middle names
- Initials in place of first name
- First initial, middle name
- Phonetic spellings
- Possible misinterpretations of handwritten letters — I talk about this in my blog post, Sometimes you gotta browse.
If you’re compiling your list of ancestors to look for on the 1950 census, it might be smart to add these variations–then hang on to them for future searches.
Photo by Sam Dan Truong on Unsplash
Leave a Reply