Expand your Searches to find an Ancestor

Barbara asked about Charles Gebhardt born in 1879 in Manhattan, New York to parents Friedrick and Annie Gebhardt. She had quite a few interesting and challenging questions about a possible name change, census records etc, and at the end of her email, as a PS she wrote

PS--I have the Naturalization papers for Friederick Karl Gebhardt. He says he came to the US in 1872 but I can't find him. His wife had a child in Germany about that time but the last three children were born in NY.

Olive Tree Answer: Dear Barbara, I spent some time on your questions but will respond to those another time. Right now I want to answer your question about Friederick arriving in USA 1872. Search engines are wonderful genealogy tools but they offer more options besides searching on a full name and exact dates.

For example, if I'm using the Ancestry.com Search engine to look for ships passenger lists, I'm using wildcards! So FRIEDERICK becomes FRI* (the asterisk replaces letters). I would also try FRE* in case the name was mis-transcribed. Gebhardt can be mistranscribed or spelled incorrectly so I'm using GEB* (you have to have 3 letters on Ancestry before you can use the wildcard feature)

For year of arrival, I always allow a couple of years on either side of what I believe the year is. People forget, they can be out by a year or two. So I"m going to search for FRI* GEB* arriving between 1870 and 1874

Bingo! Up came this hit

Name:Friedr Gebhard
Arrival Date:15 Jun 1872
Estimated Birth Year:abt 1824
Age:48
Gender:Male
Port of Departure:Hamburg, Germany
Destination:United States of America
Place of Origin:Germany
Ethnicity/Race­/Nationality:German
Ship Name:Allemannia

A peek at the image reveals Friederick, his wife Anna and 3 children. Friederick's name is recorded as Friedr. His surname has no "t" on the end. The two boys have only their first initial recorded - G. for one boy and A. for the other. This is a really good example of other search techniques I've talked about previously - leaving off the names and looking under years of birth, locations or other known facts. You might be interested in reading O Where O Where Has My Ancestor Gone? which has some examples of actual searches and how to work around the dreaded "NOT FOUND".