How do you use a Soundex to find trace a person?

Question

Can anyone explain how a Soundex works?

I found a marriage certificate for my grandmother (Barbara Elizabeth Katanic) to a man by the name of Bernard Olson that was dated as May 10, 1934. The certificate number is #9460 and the County: Manhattan.. What I am not understanding is that the Bride has a Soundex: K352 and the Groom has a Soundex: O425.

What, if anything, can I find out from the Soundex? Is there a website that I can plug in the Soundex number or is there a different Soundex number for each website?

Since 'Olson' has various spellings, is there an easy way to find this Bernard Olson or whatever became of him?

How do you recognize divorces/annulments within a family tree, or do you?

Answer 1

I've only needed the soundex number at my state library where some records are on microfilm that way.  If you search online you only have to click the box and it will convert and search by soundex for you.

It takes out the vowels and double letters, among other things, and makes a number. This way similar names are filed together.

I don't like using the soundex online as I get way too many names that aren't even close to what I'm looking for.

My approach for different spellings is to put the first 3 letters of the last name in and add an * (which is a wildcard and will give me names with the same first 3 plus any letters after that). Some sites have different wildcard characters, instead of the * so look in their instructions and see what they use.

As far as the divorces/annulments, it depends on if the researcher put that information in there or if they chose to print notes (if they made notes). My program lets me have a field called divorce or annullment so I can enter that information but if I print out a simple tree I can chose not to list that information. So you might see a guy with more than one wife, but you don't know if she died or whatever.

Name: Barbara Elizabeth Vitiello

[Barbara Elizabeth Katanic]

Father: Katanic

Birth: 25 Dec 1909 - Pennsylvania

Death: 21 Feb 1992 - San Diego

This may be your grandmother's ship record when she came back from Prague, has her name as Berta

Name: Berta Katanic

Birth: 25 Dec 1909

Departure: Gdynia, Poland

Arrival: 23 Feb 1932 - New York, New York

Ship Pulaski

She was born in Clairton, PA and she's living with friend John Vascelik in Carterer, NY.

Answer 2

The premier site for understanding the SOUNDEX system is the CLAYTON GENEALOGICAL LIBRARY in Houston, TX.  There is also a book you can purchase discussing the Immigration and the Customs Soundex systems.

Answer 3

Soundex is a phonetic algorithm for indexing names by sound, as pronounced in English. The goal is for names with the same pronunciation to be encoded to the same representation so that they can be matched despite minor differences in spelling (like Olson, Olsen; Smith, Smyth, Smythe; Johnson, Johnsen, etc. for instance).

American Soundex was used in the 1930s for a retrospective analysis of the US censuses from 1890 through 1920.

     The Soundex code for a name consists of a letter followed by three digits: the letter is the first letter of the name, and the digits encode the remaining consonants. Similar sounding consonants share the same digit so, for example, the labials B, F, P, and V are each encoded as  1. Vowels can affect the coding, but are not coded themselves except as the first letter.

The correct value can be found as follows:

Replace consonants with digits as follows (but do not change the first letter):

b, f, p, v => 1

c, g, j, k, q, s, x, z => 2

d, t => 3

l => 4

m, n => 5

r => 6

(1) Collapse adjacent identical digits into a single digit of that value.

(2)Remove all non-digits after the first letter.

(3) Return the starting letter and the first three remaining digits. If needed, append zeroes to make it a letter and three digits. Using this algorithm, both "Robert" and "Rupert" return the same string "R163" while "Rubin" yields "R150".

  A similar algorithm called "Reverse Soundex" prefixes the last letter of the name instead of the first.

Using the system above, Katanic uses the letters K, t, n & c (or K352), and Olson uses O, l, s, n (or O425).

An article on the Soundex and use in genealogy is at http://www.avotaynu.com/soundex.html.

I think some family tree charts have places on them for divorces, etc. This site--http://www.family-tree.co.uk/acatalog/Wa...  England has a "Complete Family Tree Chart" and says on it there are additional boxes for extra information such as Divorce, Re-marriage etc. and any other additional information. It sells for 6 British Pounds

(6.00 GBP = 11.6847 USD, or $11.68 rounded off, using a currency converter).