Using wildcards in searches - Example 2.
Sarah Wilson was known to be born ca. 1822 in Greasley. We are looking for her siblings.
Following the principle of the previous example, we search for CNAME Sara*.
This will pick up Sara, Sarah, Sarah Ann, etc.
Because she could be illegitimate, we search for either CNAME = Sara* and FSURN
= WILSON or
the usual CNAME = Sara* and FSURN = WILSON
We find this search gives us a long list of 217 possibilities.
We can narrow this down by searching a narrow date range -say 1820 to 1830
(If she was born in 1822, then there is no point in searching earlier, but she
could have been baptized many years after her birth.)
MS access uses the format
between #date 1# and #date
2# to specify dates.
The exact format of date 1 and date 2 will depend on the settings you have on
your computer.
Look in the date column of your Baptisms table if you are not sure of the format
to use. I use dd/MMM/YYYY, and that is the format I therefore need to
put in the query.
(Note - not all columns are shown here, those not shown are unchanged from the
previous query)
Click on
to execute
the query, when you should see:
Without separate evidence, there is no way of knowing which is the correct
baptism.
I find from a marriage certificate that her father was William, and hence it
is the baptism
15 June 1823, in Bulwell that is the required one, not that in Greasley 23 March
1823.
We can now enter the search for all children of William and Catherine.
I chose to search on W* for William and on ?at* for Catherine. The ? represents
a SINGLE character - in this case I am thinking of 'C' or 'K', but it will find
any other single character. It will also find Kate, if that was how she was
known.
(But note that it would also find any Matilda Wilson married to e.g. Walter
Wilson.)
I will also increase the date range, from say 1800 to 1860, because I don't
know whether Sarah was born late, middle or early in her parents marriage.
Thus my search looks like this:
Clicking of the datasheet button brings up:
It is obvious now that my wildcards in Catherine's name were superfluous - her name was always spelled the same way.
However, with William, we have caught three different spellings - William,
Willm, and Willm. (with a stop after the name).
A search of the baptism database has shown 27 different spellings for William
alone - see the possibilities here.
Some of these spellings may be typing errors in the transcriptions, but we always
need to be vigilant.
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