Roots & Branches

This past Mother’s Day weekend was also my mother’s 75^th birthday.  For the past year, I have been asking her what she would like to do for her big day.  The only answer I would get each time was “I just want all my kids home at one time”.

For some families this might not be so hard, but for ours it never seems to work.  I am one of five daughters and there is always one that can not make it or we will all be there, but the grandkids can not.  Work, health, and life in general always get’s in the way.

Well I sent out an email to all the sisters and their families telling them Mom’s wish.  We emailed back and forth.  Plans were made and changed, and changed again.  To all our amazement, we finally came up with a plan.  We started with a small party and ended up with a bit larger one, 90 to 100 people.

When you get out family together, it is never a small affair.  There are five daughters, 12 grandchildren, 18 great-grandchildren (with two on the way).  All in all, there are almost 40 in our immediate family.  So, by the time you add a few close friends and the extended family you really have a party!

The party was great.  I am so pleased. But mostly I am thrilled because Mom was so happy with everything.  It was great to see her eyes light up every time someone new showed up at the door.

My right hand in planning the party was my sister Tracy.  She did such a great job doing the decorations.  She used the old pictures we have of my Mom through the course of her life, placed them in frames and used them as table decorations (Everyone just loved looking at the cute kid pics).   Next she took info about Mom and her life and made a poster of events and happenings from the time she was born until now.  It was so cool.  Mom was so moved she cried.  I love happy tears.

We took the opportunity to take a picture of the 30 something family members that were there.  Everyone is looking forward to getting a copy.  We also took generation pictures and family groupings.  This was a great opportunity to catch up on the photos that people forget to take and share.

One of Mom’s favorite gifts was a packet of scanned old photos from her cousin in Idaho.  We all loved looking at them.  This cousin had copied old photos of grandparents, great-grandparents, and all the family in-between.  It was great that she took the time to identify as many as possible.  We had no idea these photos existed.  What a surprise.  What a great gift idea!

I guess my point in sharing all this is not just telling you what a great time we all had, but to remind others that opportunities like this do not happen everyday.  If you want to have the memories and the pictures and the home movies, and all the love in one room, take the time and get all your loved ones together.  Time passes much to fast.  We forget, we get busy and then the next thing you know, those people are gone.  After all, this is why we do genealogy, to share with our families.

One of my favorite all-time lines is “Take Time for Family”, and thank goodness we did.

(A special XOXOXOXOXO to all my family)

According to Wikipedia an explanation of the Soundex Coding System is:

Soundex is a phonetic algorithm for indexing names by sound, as pronounced in English. The goal is for names with the same pronunciation to be encoded to the same representation so that they can be matched despite minor differences in spelling^[1]. Soundex is the most widely known of all phonetic algorithms and is often used (incorrectly) as a synonym for “phonetic algorithm”. Improvements to Soundex are the basis for many modern phonetic algorithms^{[citation needed]}.

History

Soundex was developed by Robert C. Russell and Margaret K. Odell and patented in 1918^[2] and 1922^[3]. A variation called American Soundex was used in the 1930s for a retrospective analysis of the US censuses from 1890 through 1920. The Soundex code came to prominence in the 1960s when it was the subject of several articles in the Communications and Journal of the Association for Computing Machinery (CACM and JACM), and especially when described in Donald Knuth‘s magnum opus, The Art of Computer Programming.

The National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) maintains the current rule set for the official implementation of Soundex used by the U.S. Government.^[1] These encoding rules are available from NARA, upon request, in the form of General Information Leaflet 55, “Using the Census Soundex”.

 Rules

The Soundex code for a name consists of a letter followed by three digits: the letter is the first letter of the name, and the digits encode the remaining consonants. Similar sounding consonants share the same digit so, for example, the labials B, F, P, and V are each encoded as 1. Vowels can affect the coding, but are not coded themselves except as the first letter. However if “h” or “w” separate two consonants that have the same soundex code, the consonant to the right of the vowel is not coded.

The correct value can be found as follows:

1. If “h”, “w” separate two consonants with the same soundex code, change consonants to right of the vowel into “h” until they have the same soundex code
2. Replace consonants with digits as follows (but do not change the first letter):
   • b, f, p, v => 1
   • c, g, j, k, q, s, x, z => 2
   • d, t => 3
   • l => 4
   • m, n => 5
   • r => 6
3. Collapse adjacent identical digits into a single digit of that value.
4. Remove all non-digits after the first letter.
5. Return the starting letter and the first three remaining digits. If needed, append zeroes to make it a letter and three digits.

Using this algorithm, both “Robert” and “Rupert” return the same string “R163″ while “Rubin” yields “R150″. “Ashcraft” yields “A261″.

Soundex variants

A similar algorithm called “Reverse Soundex” prefixes the last letter of the name instead of the first.

The NYSIIS algorithm was introduced by the New York State Identification and Intelligence System as an improvement to the Soundex algorithm. NYSIIS handles some multi-character n-grams and maintains relative vowel positioning, whereas Soundex does not.

As a response to deficiencies in the Soundex algorithm, Lawrence Philips developed the Metaphone algorithm for the same purpose. Philips later developed an improvement to Metaphone, which he called Double-Metaphone. Double-Metaphone includes a much larger encoding rule set than its predecessor, handles a subset of non-Latin characters, and returns a primary and a secondary encoding to account for different pronunciations of a single word in English.

Daitch-Mokotoff Soundex (D-M Soundex) was developed by genealogist Gary Mokotoff and later improved by genealogist Randy Daitch because of problems they encountered while trying to apply the Russell Soundex to Jews with Germanic or Slavic surnames (such as Moskowitz vs. Moskovitz or Levine vs. Lewin). D-M Soundex is sometimes referred to as “Jewish Soundex” or “Eastern European Soundex” ^[4], although the authors discourage the use of these nicknames. The D-M Soundex algorithm can return as many as 32 individual phonetic encodings for a single name. Results of D-M Soundex are returned in an all-numeric format between 100000 and 999999. This algorithm is much more complex than Russell Soundex.

For the whole article go to:  www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soundex

Why do you need this information?  While you are doing your research, you with see where is an option for the Soundex.  Many times names have been put down wrong or someone just had no idea how the name should have been spelled, so they put it down as it sounded.  For instance, the name Brown has been seen on Census Records as Braun or Brawn.  I would have never thought to look under those spellings had I not allowed the search to look into Soundex also.  I advise that you try the exact spelling first.  You might get lucky and get the right person first, but if not the Soundex is the next step to try. 

Good Luck with your search!