How to use
Browse the Surnames
The easiest way to simply browse the list is to select Inventory from the menu. The Inventory provides a listing, in 4 sections, of all the surnames dealt with here. Each part of the listing contains links in the Sidebar to the other parts. The listing is not interactive - to see the variants for any surname on this Inventory use either the Surnames and Variants option or the Search option. More on both below.
It is also possible to browse the surnames, and see their variants, by choosing the Surnames and Variants option. Selecting the first name shown will open a screen that has that chosen name as the first entry on it, and it is followed by several more. Use of the Next and Previous buttons (on the Menu bar) will allow scrolling through all the names.
Finding a Surname
There are three ways of doing this:
- Select the Inventory option as outlined above
- Select the Surnames and Variants option from the menu, then scroll down to see if the surname of interest appears. If so, select it.
- Use the Search Option. The Search's wildcard option makes this the most useful if searching for specific names that have spelling type variants.
Examining a Surname
Each Surname entry is in the form "The surname XXX has or may have as variant forms the following surname(s): YYY, ZZZ"
Selecting any one of the variant forms will bring up its entry near the top of the screen.
The screen presented will also contain a number of other entries (around 30 in most case). Scroll up or down if required to see all the names on this screen, and use the Previous or Next buttons on the Menu to load another screenfull.
The Search Option
When selected, the Search Option shows a Question Mark (?) in the top right corner. Select this to receive a warning that the First and Middle Names option of the search must be left blank. It also gives examples of how to use the Wildcard operators of * and ? in any search.
Note that the search will show up only what could be termed as Spelling Variants. Thus a search for Cart* will return Carten, Carthy, Carton and Carty. But, for example, the entry for Carten contains 17 possible variants, only one of which is revealed in the search. Therefore the Search facility is a starting point only.