Introduction
Nominex is a surname matching system designed to help in locating surname variants in computerized databases, especially of genealogical data.
Given a specific surname, it returns a list of alternative spellings ranked in order of similarity. So for instance, given the surname Gale, it would return alternatives such as Gaile, Gayle and Gail. These are regarded as very similar and therefore carry high scores. Lower down the list are spellings such as Gailes, Gales, Gayles, with less plausible variants including Geale, Gayler and Kale.
Nominex has been in development for several years, and its algorithms are highly optimized for surnames of British origin as recorded in historical documents. It is thus ideally suited to family history / genealogical database applications, either on-line or on CD-Rom. It has been used in the surname search algorithms in the National Burial Index (3rd Edition), issued by the Federation of Family History Societies in 2010.
Use the links at left to find out more, or click here to go straight to the demo page.
Please if you would like to use the system for your own database.
Site update: 29 August 2019