How does D become W??

[Orangeblossom]

Was searching through the Ancestry database for a birth in the 1940s. I've been searching for ages under D, which is the first letter of the name. I thought it would make it easier to find now it's all transcribed.

It was easier - the GRO have it under W!!

How, in any language, can D look like W?

Oh well - I can honestly say now - Ancestry has come up trumps! :D

[Little Nell]

I've found that P becomes C on several censuses, so who knows.

On the other hand, D is typed with middle finger of left hand and W with ring finger of left hand so it might be a mistype. D is just below and slightly to the right of W on the keyboard.

I've also found a Kent website of marriages, where my grandmother's first name is down as Kgladys instead of Gladys and I don't see how they managed that!

[Orangeblossom]

lol Glad I'm not the only one who finds weird indexing.

I can now see your point about the letters being so close.

It's a good thing I knew they existed, or I never would have found them!

[Christine in Herts]

I can imagine an upper-case D could look like a W in a very specific way:

If the initial vertical is created by starting at the top and going down and back up, and the loop by making an anti-clockwise (i.e. down, again, across, up and back) circular stroke, left incomplete... it ends up looking a bit like VU... which isn't so far from W if it's all joined up. I think I've seen some initial letters like that.

Christine

[jorog]

I had the same problem with a D and W on the 1901 Census. Looking at handwritten images, an uppercase D can easily be mistaken for a W. It was sks who found my elusive D*** transcribed as W***.
Jo

[Uncle John]

I've just had one in 1911 census that got past the transcriber or the OCR software:

JUAN for IVAN

Fortunately I was able to pick another family member and find the address and family. In partial mitigation, I can see how it happened. But since I'm a 1911 freeloader I have no means of submitting an error report.