Ignore— This condition is the default setting and can be helpful in expanding your search if too few or no records meet your initial search criteria. If you are trying to locate a passenger, but cannot find them by searching for First and Last Name, try ignoring the First Name and resubmit your search. If you are unsure of the passengers first name or suspect the name you knew your ancestor by was not their name at birth, this items may be helpful when used in conjunction with other Advanced Search data options. This condition can also be useful in finding ancestors with the same Surname (Last Name) originating from the same Village or Town or travelling on the same Ship.

Is— When using this condition, you are searching for a specific first name to appear exactly as you have specified in your search criteria. This may seem straight forward, but a special feature used when volunteers created the index requires some explaination. The original manifest documents included a field for the first name each passenger.

At the time the now historic documents were created, there were variations in how names were entered. Some historic manifests contain the full first name (e.g. - Patrick, Edward, William, etc.), while others contain abbreviated versions (e.g. - Pat or Patk. for Patrick, Ed or Edw. for Edward, Will or Wm. for William, etc.). Anticipating how these records would be searched, the project called for volunteers to enter two separate data elements for First Name. The first was First Name exactly as they saw it on the historical document (e.g. - An obvious abbreviation of Patk. would be transcribed as Patk. - including the period. Similarly, Pietro would be noted as Peter, etc.). The second data element for First Name was an educated interpretation of what that name is 'likely to be' (e.g. - An Irish male listed as Patk. is likely to be Patrick). When you submit a search, the comparison is done against the interpreted name since that is likely to include your intended result, but the exact entry from the historic document is what is presented. That is why a search for First Name is Edward will return results including Ed and Edw., as well as Edward.

Starts With— Searching for a name that starts with a letter or string of letters will search for all records that match this criteria. If you specify 'pa', the search results would include any First Name containing 'pa' as the first two letters of that name, regardless of what characters followed. Examples would include 'Pat', 'Patrick', 'Patricia', 'Pasquale', 'Paola', 'Paula', and so on. To narrow a search using this condition, you should enter as much of the name as possible to filter out unlikely records.

Contains— This condition is similar to Starts With, but the important difference is that characters being searched in this case can appear anywhere within the First Name field, as long as they appear in the same order. Using the example from above, a search for First Name that contains 'pa' would still bring up the names listed above, but would also bring up 'Cleopatro' and 'Giuseppa' since the letters 'pa' appear somewhere within the string, but not necessarily at the beginning.

Is— This condition functions the same for Last Name as it does elsewhere in Advanced Search. The string provided when you submit your search is compared against the Last Name field in the database. If you have selected the First Name is condition, then only those last names that match your input are returned. The comparison is non-case sensitive and will also ignore spacing that may appear within a Last Name. For example, text entries where Last Name is 'Di Tota', 'Ditota', 'ditota', 'DiTota', and 'DI TOTA' would all yield the same results. When this condition is used for searching on a Last Name, the First Name field must contain at least 3 characters.

Starts With— Searching for a name that starts with a letter or string of letters will search for all records that match this criteria. When used with Last Name, a minumum of 2 characters must be supplied. If you specify 'pa', the search results would include any First Name containing 'pa' as the first two letters of that name, regardless of what characters followed. Examples would include 'Pat', 'Patrick', 'Patricia', 'Pasquale', 'Paola', 'Paula', and so on. To narrow a search using this condition, you should enter as much of the name as possible to filter out unlikely records.

Sounds Like— The Last Name field is the only area within Advanced Search that incorporates a 'Sounds Like' condition which can be used to expand your passenger search. The Ellis Island database index uses a customized system that provides a choice of alternate spellings for the name that would sound the same, but be spelled differently. For example - Smith, Smyth, and Smythe. You cannot do a soundex search at this time, but searching on the name will generate a list of possible phonetic equivalents for a broader search.