I’m searching for an immigrant to the United States named Johan Antoine Willi who was born around 1801 in Switzerland or possibly Germany. That ends up being quite a few search variants to use when querying nationwide databases. To keep myself in line and not miss anything, I’ve made myself a list of search options for those sites that use a “*” as a wildcard:

  • Joh* Wil* born in Germany
  • Joh* Wil* born in Switzerland
  • Ant* Wil* born in Germany
  • Ant* Wil* born in Switzerland

The drawback is that this approach catches many names are are not close to Willi–such as Williams, Willems, Wilhelm, etc. I could choose to use a Soundex or sound-based variant option on the last name as well. The key is that I have a list of all the search options that I will use so that I do not leave any search combinations out.

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