Beginning with our Chester County Tax List CD-ROM, the
Retrospector Viewer has the capability to perform searches based on the
Soundex used by the US Census Bureau. The Soundex, or sound-index,
groups names together based on the way they sound. This tool is
especially useful for finding names with spelling variations. For
example, "Smith" and "Smythe" have the same Soundex code.
While the use of wildcard characters in a search criteria can
beneficial when spelling variations exist, they can be more complicated to
use. For example, to find variations of the name "Junkins," a
Super Wildcard search could be conducted the criteria "j + nk + n
+".
As an alternative, the Soundex search could be conducted
simply by using "junkins" as the criterion. The illustration
below is based on a search in the Chester County CD-ROM.
"Junkins" is typed in the box and the Soundex code is generated
automatically. When the Use Soundex button is clicked, all the
words on the CD-ROM with the identical code are displayed for use in an
advanced search.
There are searches that work less well with the Soundex, for
example, "lewis" with a code of L200 is a fairly ambiguous criteria,
and will generate many words which are not of interest. Use of the Super
Wildcard is advantageous with names of this type. With the two tools,
very complete and fast searches can be conducted.