Hooray for Wild Cards!

 It's been awhile since I posted. I've been busily working on my genealogy with Zotero and Trello as my companions. I'll post more about those another time, but today I want to talk about wild cards. What is a wild card, you ask? Simply put, it is doing a search with an asterisk substituted for a letter or group of letters. This is useful when you aren't sure of the exact spelling of a name. For example, I have seen my Janco surname spelled alternately as Janko, Jansgo, and even Jansco. Rather than search for these individually, I could use a wild card to search for the name 'Ja*o'.

And that is exactly what I did early today. I've been searching for some time for my Paul Janco in ship manifests with no luck, even using creative spellings of the name. I knew that he was already in the US when the rest of his family arrived in 1911. Recently I found him in census records (another story!) and learned that he arrived in 1907. I did a quick search for him on Family Search, again with no luck! So I decided to try a wild card search.

First I narrowed my search. I knew that he family had arrived through the Port of Baltimore, and thought there was a good chance that he would have traveled through the same port before sending for his family. I knew I could widen the search to other ports if necessary, so I restricted my search to Baltimore Passenger Records. I typed 'Ja*o' into the surname box, but I knew that I'd searched for Paul Janco and Paul Jansco with no luck earlier. So on a hunch, I also used a wild card for the first name, typing in 'P*l'. I knew he was born about 1865, so I restricted the birth years from 1860-1870. I hit search and BOOM! — there it was! Along with yet another spelling — JANCSO.

Pal Jansco Maryland, Baltimore Passenger Lists, 1820-1948

From other information on the ship manifest, I can see that Paul is traveling to St. Louis to join George Kovacs. There is something written in front of Georg that I can't make out. I can also see that this is not the first time that Paul has entered the US. In 1904, he arrived in the US with a destination of Akron, Ohio.
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​You can see the full image here.