[Ger-Poland-Volhynia] Beider-Morse Phonetic Matching

[Karl Krueger]

I just used JewishGen Gazateer to look for some towns and was surprised to see no hits coming up for spellings I thought would have lots of possibilities. Then I noticed they changed the default search from the Daitch-Mokotoff Soundex to the Beider-Morse Phonetic Spelling. I looked up the rules for this system and they are very complex and intends to stretch across multiple languages and alphabets. Apparently it was designed for matching surnames of people, but in my experience it does not hold much use for town names in eastern Europe.

Although D-M Soundex is overly permissive it still should give you the correct hit. This is a case where too much is better than nothing at all. Just be forewarned when you use this Gazateer as there are more useful search criteria than the default BMPS. Since I hadn't used this Gazateer in a while I don't know when they instituted this change.