Wild cards are symbols used in place of unknown letters in a word. They can be used in searches when you don't know an exact spelling.

Wild card symbols

Ancestry uses the asterisk (*) and the question mark (?) as wild cards.

An asterisk (*) represents 0 to 5 characters. If you wanted to search for different spellings of the name Matthew (like Mathew and Matthiu), you could do a wild card search that would find each different ending: Mat*.

A question mark (?) represents 1 character. If you didn’t know whether a name were spelled Nielson or Nielsen, you could do a search for the name using a wild card where the unknown letter goes: Niels?n.

Wild card rules

1. All searches containing wild cards must contain at least 3 non-wild card letters. For example, *ill would work, but *ll would not. 
2. The first and last character in a search can't both be wild cards. Searching *ohnson and Johnso* would work, but *ohnso* would not.
3. Wild cards don't work with Soundex matches.

Ways to use wild cards

• To replace a single unknown letter: 
• To find names that begin with the same letters. Fran* will produce results for both Frank and Francine.
• To find first letter(s), as in *aylor and *ompson
• To find alternate spellings of the same name. Searching for Lac* will produce results for Lacy, Lacey, Laci, and Lacie.