San Diego: Steve Morse speaks, July 12

Steve Morse of One-Step Webpages fame will speak at the next meeting of the San Diego Jewish Genealogical Society on Sunday, July 12, so mark your calendars and let everyone know.

The program begins at 1pm, at the Lawrence Family Jewish Community Center in La Jolla.


Steve will speak on Phonetic Matching and Lesser-Known Gems.

Phonetic Matching: An Alternative to Soundex with Fewer False Hits

Searching for names in large databases containing spelling variations often means using soundex, which encodes each name into a number with other like-sounding names. The search is then based on matching numbers, or all names that sound like the target name. The "sounds-alike" criteria is based on spelling, with no regard to how the name might be pronounced in a particular language. Phonetic encoding described here incorporates rules for determining the language based on the spelling of the name, along with pronunciation rules for the common languages. This has the advantage of eliminating matches that might appear to "sound alike" under the pure spelling criteria of soundex but are phonetically quite unrelated. (Developed by Alexander Beider and Stephen Morse)

One-Step Webpages: A Hodgepodge of Lesser-Known Gems
There are too many utilities on the One-Step website to be covered in a single talk, so many of them found their way to the cutting room floor when the Potpourri talk was being edited. However several of those are quite useful. This talk describes those gems that you might not otherwise be aware of. They range from problems with genealogical searches to problems with identity theft and with DNA.

Reservations are required, email here. Fee is $5.

For more on the society and its programs, click here.

For more on Steve Morse and the many resources of his site, click here.