I’m not sure what term to use in describing what feature I’m looking for. When you enter Conrad in the search line of the Index to the left of the main People window, it will not show Konrads. Similarly you have to search separately for Elisabeth and Elizabeth. Is there a setting in RM 11 that I can turn on so I don’t have to make multiple searches?
Look up "wildcard searching in HELP.
%onrad will return both C and K as the first letter as well as any other first letter.
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There may be some kind of symbol you can use such as *onrad in other apps will usually find Conrad/ Konrad BUT I haven’t figured out what it is-- on a surname just typing ONR will pull up all Conrads and Konrads..
on a given name make sure you put a COMMA in first and then , ELI will bring up all Elizabeths and Elisabeths
RM does not support “sounds like” searches per se in its search boxes. Instead, it supports matches that contain the string you enter. So if you enter smith as a surname, it will match on Highsmith. That’s why onrad might work well for you. However, it is a string search, so onrad doesn’t have to start as the second letter. It can be anywhere in the name.
In search boxes, the search string can also be in the given name. You can force it to search exactly starting with the surname by preceding the search with a double quote. That way, "smith will find Smith without finding Highsmith and will not find Smith as a given name.
The search boxes also support _ as a single letter wildcard and % as a multiple letter wildcard. So _onrad will force the onrad string to be found beginning at the second letter. That might meet your needs at times.
In the main search tab in contrast to the search boxes, the Basic Search supports a FInd Close Matches option. It does work, but in general I find it too loosey goosey for my taste. However, it does not seem to find Konrad when I search for Conrad or vice versa. In that case, it’s not loosey goosey enough.
In general, I’m not a big fan of “sounds like” searches because my own surname of Bryan usually is a “sounds alike” match for Brown, and there are almost as many Browns as there are Smiths. So my “sounds alike” matches for Bryan get drowned out by matches on Brown, So I prefer exact searches which support wildcards.
Perhaps “soundex”?
If so, once you calculate a person’s soundex value, RootsMagic can use it in the search capabilities according to this help page:
Both _ and % work to give me a work around. Thanks BobC and Jerry for those suggestions. I wish RM did this automatically, like FamilySearch’s website does.