How the “Sounds Like” Search Matches Names

Most families never had one fixed spelling of their name. A clerk wrote down what he heard, in the spelling habits of his own language — and in the Częstochowa-Radomsko region, the language of the records changed again and again. The same family can appear in Polish civil records, in Russian (Cyrillic) registers from the decades when this part of Poland kept its civil records in Russian, in German wartime documents, and in Jewish community records kept in Yiddish or Hebrew letters.

Each of those languages spells the same sounds its own way. The "sh" sound is sz in Polish and sch in German, so one spoken name appears as Szwarc in a Polish register, Schwarz in a German one, and שווארץ in a Yiddish one. Cyrillic has no letter for "h", so in Russian-era registers Hofman becomes Gofman. Polish records add grammatical endings — Goldbergowa is Goldberg's wife, Goldbergówna his daughter. And when a family migrated, the name was written down yet again in the new country's spelling habits: Jakubowicz, after a generation in America, is Yakubovitch or Jacobowitz.

This is why searching by exact spelling misses records that really belong to your family. When you search by sound, each name is converted to a phonetic form and compared by how it is pronounced rather than how it is spelled. This lets one search find a surname across the Polish, German, English, Yiddish, and Hebrew spellings that appear in the records, while still keeping genuinely different names apart.

The examples below are computed live by the search itself. Each pair shows its phonetic reading and a distance score; names at or below 1.0 are treated as the same name, higher scores as different names.

Same name, different spelling

Names are read by sound, not letters, so spellings from Polish, German, English, and Yiddish sources match each other.

Spelling	Spelling	Phonetic reading	Distance	Result
Jakubowicz	Yakubovitch	/jakubɔvit͡s/ · /jakubɔvitx/	0.22	same name
Fiszman	Fischman	/fiʃman/ · /fiʃman/	0.0	same name
Szwarc	Schwarz	/ʃvart͡s/ · /ʃvart͡s/	0.0	same name
Kohn	Cohn	/kɔhn/ · /kɔhn/	0.0	same name
Katz	Kac	/kat͡s/ · /kat͡s/	0.0	same name

Grammatical endings are ignored

Polish genitive and feminine endings (-ów, -owa, -owie, -ówna) mean "of" or "daughter of", so they are matched as the base surname.

Spelling	Spelling	Phonetic reading	Distance	Result
Goldberg	Goldbergowa	/ɡɔldbɛrɡ/ · /ɡɔldbɛrɡ/	0.0	same name
Goldberg	Goldbergówna	/ɡɔldbɛrɡ/ · /ɡɔldbɛrɡ/	0.0	same name
Klug	Klugów	/kluɡ/ · /kluɡ/	0.0	same name
Abramowicz	Abramowitz	/abramɔvit͡s/ · /abramɔvit͡s/	0.0	same name

German spelling conventions

An unstressed middle "e" is silent (Tillemann = Tilman) and "ae" is the vowel ä.

Spelling	Spelling	Phonetic reading	Distance	Result
Talman	Tillemann	/talman/ · /tilman/	0.25	same name
Talman	Teleman	/talman/ · /tɛlman/	0.21	same name
Telman	Taelman	/tɛlman/ · /tɛlman/	0.0	same name

The digraph "ie" is read by language

In Polish names "ie" is a glide (as in Sieradzki); in German and Yiddish names it is a long i, so Wielingier matches Willinger.

Spelling	Spelling	Phonetic reading	Distance	Result
Willinger	Wielingier	/vilinɡɛr/ · /vilinɡir/	0.09	same name
Englender	Engielender	/ɛnɡlɛndɛr/ · /ɛnɡilɛndɛr/	0.73	same name

Hebrew and Yiddish script

Names written in Hebrew letters are transliterated and matched against their Latin-letter spellings.

Spelling	Spelling	Phonetic reading	Distance	Result
Willinger	ווילינגער	/vilinɡɛr/ · /vilinɡɛr/	0.0	same name
Fiszman	פישמאן	/fiʃman/ · /fiʃman/	0.0	same name

Y and J are the same sound

A leading "Y" before a vowel is the same consonant as "J".

Spelling	Spelling	Phonetic reading	Distance	Result
Yankel	Jankel	/jankɛl/ · /jankɛl/	0.0	same name
Yosef	Josef	/jɔsɛf/ · /jɔsɛf/	0.0	same name
Yurkowicz	Jurkiewicz	/jurkɔvit͡s/ · /jurkjɛvit͡ʃ/	0.82	same name

Different names stay separate

Names that merely share a Soundex code but genuinely sound different are kept apart, so results stay precise.

Spelling	Spelling	Phonetic reading	Distance	Result
Zajdman	Zytman	/zajdman/ · /zɨtman/	1.21	different
Kac	Koch	/kat͡s/ · /kɔx/	2.18	different
Szwarc	Swierk	/ʃvart͡s/ · /svirk/	1.66	different
Brat	Broda	/brat/ · /brɔda/	1.75	different

Matching runs on top of a Daitch-Mokotoff Soundex refined over two decades of use; the phonetic reading shown here is what further separates real spelling variants from names that only happen to share a Soundex code.