<p>Suppose I have:</p>

<ol>
<li>Toby</li>
<li>Tiny</li>
<li>Tory</li>
<li>Tily</li>
</ol>

<p>Is there an algorithm that can easily create a list of common characters in the same positions in all these strings?  (in this case the common characters are 'T' at position 0 and 'y' at position 3)</p>

<p>I tried looking at some of the algorithms used for DNA sequence matching but it seems most of them are just used for finding common substrings regardless of their positions.</p>

Finding a list of characters that are common in ALL strings at a certain position is trivially simple.  Just iterate on each string for each character position 1 character position at a time.  If any string's character is not the match of it's closest neighbor string's character, then the position does not contain a common character.
For any i = 0 to length -1... Once you find Si[x] != Si+1[x] you can skip to the next position x+1.
Where Si is the ith string in the list.  And [x] is the character at position x.