One of the difficulties of locating records or data on a Polish (or Czech, Russian, Lithuanian, Ukrainian, etc.) ancestor is the many ways a name can be spelled, misspelled, mistranscribed, indexed, etc. in a database. This is why you have to be creative when trying to locate your data.
Here is an example (from my paternal grandfather’s birthplace): Pacanow. That is the English rendering. In Poland it would be written as Pacanów. Now diacriticals aside, how many possible ways can I find Pacanow in Ellis Island (probably similarly for Ancestry.com as well)? OK, you asked …
| Bacanow | Pacanszka |
| Pacanam | Pacanu |
| Pacanan | Pacauow |
| Pacananska | Pacona |
| Pacanaw | Paconon |
| Pacanciv | Paconow |
| Pacani | Pacunow |
| Pacanica | Paczanow |
| Pacanin | Pacznow |
| Pacannon | Paeanow |
| Pacanoer | Paezanov |
| Pacanon | Paezanov |
| Pacanoro | Paezanow |
| Pacanoska | Pasanov |
| Pacanou | Pasanow |
| Pacanov | Pasonaw |
| Pacanow | Pazanoz |
| Pacanowa | Pocanaer |
| Pacanowe | Pocaniz |
| Pacanowic | Pocanoa |
| Pacanowka | Pocanor |
| Pacanowka | Pocanow |
| Pacanowki | Preanon |
| Pacanowo |
Those are the ones I have found so far. That is 47 combinations! Now admittedly reading the handwriting from those ship manifests is difficult even when I am pretty sure what is being written; So I can feel for the transcribers / indexers who harvest the data and do the data entry into some database.
Now, no searching by American Soundex, Daitch-Mokotoff Soundex, or even Beider-Morse phonetic matching or even using wild-card searches, not even if you had regular-expression searches (like Oracle databases have) would I have found all of those. I do not know what to tell you to do. Be creative and persistent. Look at adjacent letters on a keyboard (for mis-typings) as data is entered. Look for letters that are swapped (i.e. Eliasz vs. Elaisz) — mistyped or dyslexic. Just keep looking. I found ‘Bacanow’, because I said what might an handwritten letter ‘P’ look like to somebody? Of course, ‘R’ and ‘B’ suggested themselves to my mind. No ‘Racanow’, but sure enough out popped a ‘Bacanow’. So you never know.
Now Stanczyk mentioned Pacanow, because I thought I was being slick and said, “What if I cannot think of all the ways a NAME can be misspelled?”. My answer was, “I know, I’ll just search on everybody coming over from the village of P-A-C-A-N-O-W.” Of course, as you might have guessed now I had a meta-problem because now I had to come up with all of the ways that Pacanow could appear. Well like the riddle, “How many licks does it take to get to the center of a Tootsie-Pop?”, I have an arbitrary answer … 47.
P.S.
I now have two spreadsheets. My first spreadsheet is my work-in-progress on the ZASUCHA of Niagara Falls SNA. The second spreadsheet I have is a rather large spreadsheet of all of the names from Pacanow (and truth be told Biechow, Piestrzec, Wojcza, …) and all of the surrounding villages that came through Ellis Island that I have found so far [plus a few mis-matches].
