Soundex Genealogy Searches
A few weeks ago I went to a presentation by Steve Morse about his One-Step Database at my local Genealogy Society Meeting. He basically went through his whole website in 90 minutes explaining how everything works. Most of the presentation I had read online, so it wasn't that new to me, but the part about generating Soundex Codes got me excited. I had never heard about needing soundex codes since I used Ancestry.com when I first started researching and their site searches soundex for you. But I did not resubscribe to Ancestry.com this year, so I have been using Heritage Quest Online instead to access U.S. Federal Census records. But as many users of this site know, they do not search by soundex. The spelling you type in is the only one their search engine can find.
So when I got home from Mr. Morse's presentation, I looked up a soundex code for one of my ancestors and then tried to use it at Heritage Quest Online. Nothing happened. I couldn't figure out how it worked. So I did some research and at first I just found a bunch of articles explaining how to figure out the Soundex code for a name. There is a very thorough article by Dick Eastman, and another one at About.com. I finally found another article by Kimberly Powell titled, Heritage Quest Online - Census Records. One of the cons on her list for this site is that there are no soundex or wildcard searches. This is definitely a con. I really enjoy using this website since it's free with my library card, but the census records are sometimes hard to search with only the head of household indexed and no soundex searching.
If you are searching a census and need the soundex code, there is a quick one-step converter by Steve Morse. And the PAF program also has a soundex calculator, so other genealogy programs might have this as well.