If you are working on your family tree, sooner or later you will run into Soundex Codes. They are used to index names for later censuses, as a filing system for surname files, and are necessary to display your family data in tiny tafel format.
The Soundex Coding system, alphabetic for the first letter of surname and numeric thereafter, keeps together names with the same or similar sounds but with variant spellings.
To search for a particular name, you must first work out the code number for the surname of the individual. No number is assigned to the first letter of the surname. If the name is Blueblood, for example, use the "B" followed by the code number for "lueblood". The next three letters coded would be "LBL", worked out according to the system below, which is 414.
Soundex Coding Guide
Code
Key Letters and Equivalents
1
b,p,f,v
2
c,s,k,g,j,q,x,z
3
d,t
4
l
5
m,n
6
r
The letters a, e, i, o, u, y, w, and h are not coded.
The first letter of the surname is not coded.
Every Soundex number must be a 3-digit number. A name yielding no code numbers, as "Lee", would be L000; one yielding only one code number would have two zeros added, such as Kuhne, coded as K500; and one yielding two code numbers would have one zero added, such as Price, coded as P620. Not more than three digits are used, so Blueblood would be coded as B414, not B4143.
When two key letters or equivalents appear together, or one key letter immediately follows or precedes an equivalent, the two are coded as one letter, by a single number, as follows: Kelly, coded as K400; Buerck, coded as B620, Lloyd, coded as L300; and Schaefer, coded as S160.
Prefixes to surnames, such as van, Von, Di, de, le, Di, D', dela, or du are sometimes disregarded in alphabetizing and in coding. When doing a search using a Soundex code for these names, be sure to check both codes just in case. For example: "de Kirketon" could be coded using "D-KRK" as D262 rather than "K-RKT" as K623.
Ready for a little practice? Here's a simple Soundex calculator written in Javascript by Stephen Heise, that's been used across the Internet and is the best one I've found so far.
