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FIND MY PAST SEARCHING - Warning

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AdrianBruce
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Joined: 14 Jun 2020, 18:57
Location: South Cheshire

Re: FIND MY PAST SEARCHING - Warning

Post by AdrianBruce »

Mick Loney wrote: 09 Feb 2023, 15:56 ... searching for Marriage of Drusilla Eliza Holt in 1913, I carelessly left off final a of her first name, and entered Drusill, yet despite ticking use name variants for forename, it failed to find her! ... One would think that Drusill was close enough to Drusilla to meet their name variant criteria, for FMP to find the marriage, apparently not! ...
Name Variants, so far as I know, are not the same sort of thing as phonetic variations. I assume that phonetic variations of "Drusill" would match "Drusilla". But Variants tend to be entries in some sort of tables compiled by people(?) and sold to users like FMP. Or at least, that's my impression. Thus if no-one had ever heard of "Drusill", then it wouldn't appear in any of these tables, so wouldn't match "Drusilla".

There's another quirk on those variants that I believe I've seen - if A is a variant of B, then it doesn't follow that B is a variant of A.

It's all a bit weird....
Adrian Bruce
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