These 18th century documents do not always conform to modern spelling
rules, which can make searching difficult. You might not think of
spellings like “nabor” or “afeckshonat” or “prittey.”
If you check the box marked “sounds like” the search will be
more lenient about exact matches, but this is no guarantee that you
will
always find what you want.
We have been compiling a list of variant spellings in the Franklin papers, and we plan to use this list to improve our searching in the future.