I was using asterisks on my own tree for one particular line. I stopped working on it and when I returned I forgot what I had been doing so had to delete them all.
I've been reading comments on the FTM users group and they say that if a name is unknown to use 5 _ to denote the name. For some reason ancestry can deal with that but will search for other names as they are written and therefore wont find them.
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Toni 
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