The accepted wild characters are  :

• The percent sign « % » - replacing a group of alphanumeric characters at its location in the field. For example "Ph%" in the field "First Name" will give all the first names beginning by "Ph" : Philippe, Philémon... for men and Phonsine, Philomene... for women.

• The underscore « _ » - replacing a single alphanumeric character at its location in the field. For example : "Ba_l" in the "Surname" field will give all the surnames beginning by "Ba" and where the fourth letter is "l". Example : Bahl, Bail, Ball.

  Wild characters can be located anywhere except at the beginning of "Surname".

  N.B.: To improve research, a wild character " % " is automatically inserted at the end of "Surname" field and at the beginning and end of any other fields.

The system accepts any capital or lowercase letters, un-accentuated or accentuated letters . They return exactly the same results.

Advice

The research tools at your disposal are particularly powerful and effective . With time, you will be able to make use of them effectively to find the records you seek.

You can forget the percent sign "%" at the end of a field. The system will automatically add one and return all the names or first names starting with the few  letters entered. On the other hand, if you wish your research to be made on the exact data as captured, check the box located at the right-hand side of the field.

One must remember that the registers contain many orthographical variations, even for  people of the same family and even for a single individual in different records.If you are not sure of the spelling of a name, you can enter the first 2 letters of the name, the sign "%" and the last letter. For example, by entering the following expression for your research: "BE%R", you will obtain all the names which start with BE and contain a R further down (For example: Bernier, Besner, Bergeron, etc).

To avoid being confronted with too many hits, you can choose to fill in more information in each field, or use more fiels (first name, year, location, etc.).