Search Tips
The editor writes:
Guided Search
The Guided Seach is more powerful than the Quick Search.
With several thousand abstracts per year, it may be best to
progressively narrow your search from the general to the
particular, using a combination of search qualifications:
either specify a particular year, or choose “All Years”.
If unsuccessful, make a note of the parameter/s you searched on,
and try another approach.
You may search in upper or lower case.
Searching the main abstract text
There are three boxes for you to use for free text
searches of the abstracts. For example, you may be looking
for a specific name, place, event, type of product or occupation
or for any other word including keywords and qualifiers.
Personal names are shown with their original spelling, but
places & occupations use modern spellings.
A wide variation is possible in the spelling of surnames
e.g. Smith/Smyth, or Simpson/Sympson.
Words in regular use in the abstract text are often
abbreviated.
By default, the database applies an initial wild card. Thus, a
search on pin will give Pinniger, Orpin, Pincher, spinning, keeping
etc. This initial wild card effect can be avoided by using a blank
space (carriage return, illustrated here by ˆ) before the initial
character of your query. Thus, a search on ˆpin now only gives
Pinniger, pint etc. Similarly, a search on Smith will give
blacksmith, Smith, Smithers, etc, however, a search on ˆsmith will
not find blacksmith, but will give all the other terms.
By default, the database also incorporates a terminal search
“wild card.” It will thus find pluralised words, e.g. a search in
1785 on trim gave Trim, Trimnells’s, Trimgate & trimmings. A
search on ˆcoach gave 14 pages of abstracts including coaches,
coachmaker & coach-house.
Use a reasonable string of letters. Thus, while Comb will find
all abstracts containing comb - coxcomb, combs, combe, Comber
etc, the wider Co is less specific & will give all these
“hits” + Coombe (Down), cooper, column, cough etc.
To find both variants in one search, use an underscore
_ (a wild card which takes the place of any single
character). Thus , ˆS_mpson (where ˆ is an initial carriage
return or blank space) finds both Simpson &
Sympson.
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Searches with 2 or more text boxes
These require the delimiters AND, OR &
NOT.
AND is very specific & very restrictive, OR is usually safer
& gives more results .
It is possible to use a single text box to search on specific
phrases such as Pauper Charity, Sunday Schools, (Bath) Improvement
Act. However, such specific words & word order need great care,
so it is probably best to allocate the components to two separate
search boxes.
For example, to find Sunday School/s:
- in 1st box type Sunday
- then select AND
- in 2nd text box type School
- then click Search
