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When looking for a known person, enter fairly exact information, but think about things like nicknames, common misspellings, etc. that may affect search results.
For example if searching for a person named “Ted”, records may use that familiar form or a full form, such as “Theodore”: A search for “T*” will look for any name that begins with “T”, catching both variations.
You can do the same thing with last names—of, if you think your last name, which is spelled D Y C K might have been misspelled by someone as D I C K, you can, in some databases, include an internal question mark. In this example, the question mark should stand for any letter between D and C. Some databases within Ancestry.com seem to have different search designs, so if you don’t get a return, especially with an internal question mark, try entering a search first with what you think is the correct spelling, and you can always try specific variant spellings in later searches if needed. Truncating the end of any name with an asterisk should work in almost all Ancestry’s databases.
Ancestry’s default search display is to show all results in the order the company’s algorithm thinks might be right. The machine might happen to guess correctly and display the record you are most interested in first. However, you *know* what you are looking for, so we recommend that you toggle over to the option to “Browse by collection”. Instead of looking through all 19 records, you can see what records may actually have the information you are looking for.
