With the number of mistranscriptions and misspellings in censuses, wildcards are extremely useful. For instance, HOLMES could equally well have been written as HOMES, so searching for HO*MES covers both possibilities. WILLIAM* covers both WILLIAM and WILLIAMS, CO*PER: COOPER and COUPER, STE*ENS: STEVENS and STEPHENS and so on. In the case of even wilder mistranscriptions, you can search with just a forename and place of birth or forename and age. age and place of birth (no name) or even just husband and wife/parent and child forenames and then look for obvious mistakes/letter patterns and check them against the image. One that springs to mind was CHANCELLOR transcribed as CLANRELLOR - the "ELLOR" caught my eye. Ancestry's search engine is much more flexible than it was, thank goodness - I think now you could even search for *ellor. MY MORTLEMANs have been variously transcribed as MORTTEMAN, MORTHEMAN, MARTLEMAN etc, so now I search for M*RT*MAN automatically Anne South Australia EVELYN WALLACE wrote: > Some of us are more clever at using search engines than others. I have not quite mastered using wild cards > [asterisks] for census searches, but as illustrated by one subscriber to this list, they can be quite > useful in searching censuses. >