08 April 2013

Misspelled Genealogy Words -- They Really Do Matter!




Dick Eastman did a post on Saturday, Genealogy's Often-Misspelled Words.

Though this is a somewhat “fun” piece, it’s also a serious topic.

In this day and age of GoogleTM searching, using all kinds of online databases and more, you may find that you don’t get the results you seek when you misspell a basic genealogy term.  After all, when we don’t spell a surname as it was written, assuming you haven’t appropriately used wildcards symbols, you won’t get the results you seek.

And, though GoogleTM is pretty good in that if I put in geneology it will show the results for genealogy, unless I tell it to do otherwise, you may find that other search engines or database interfaces are not so forgiving when we misspell words.  It is a good idea to know whether a search function permits wildcards or uses some other technology (e.g. GoogleTM uses stemming)

On the other hand, you may find that someone with a key piece of data did use the word geneology vs genealogy and if you stuck to just the correct spelling you would have missed that gem!

You might want to check out some other articles have been written on misspelled genealogy words:


When you read Dick Eastman’s post, did another often-misspelled word come to mind?  What word do you often misspell?  Has it led to some neat finds that proper spelling might have overlooked?



Editor’s Note: You can read more about GoogleTM search technology here.
Editor’s Note: It appears that the article was also published previously by Dick, Eastman's Online Genealogy Newsletter, August 17, 2010, http://www.eogn.com
Editor’s Note: Wordle was used to create the graphic 



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1 comment:

  1. Spelling is not the only problem. I never found John Doe until Family Search showed me John Doe Senior and John Doe Junior. I had not searched for Senior or Junior.

    ReplyDelete