We have provided a search facility for the site which provides the ability to perform simple and more advanced searches.
The 'Simple Search' includes a text box into which search terms can be entered. There is also a check box option to include the item descriptions in the search. This is very useful, for instance in finding names of relatives of the item's owner that have been discovered in the poster's researches. It may have the effect of increasing the number of results returned by searches
The simple search text box will accept multiple words in treat them as joined in an 'and' query, so 'Jones Manchester' will return all entries where both 'Jones' and 'Manchester' are found but not those containing only one of the entries.
Wild cards may be used in searches in that '?' will indicate a single character wild card while '*' or '%' will be treated as replacing any number of characters. thus items containing the word 'Manchester' could be returned with a search for 'Manc*', 'Manches%' or 'Man?hester".
The advanced search options allow searches based on entries in individual fields. So, for instance, where the simple search for the term 'Graham' would return all entries where that term appeared as a first name or a surname, the advanced search allows only the surname field to be searched.
Wednesday, 16 October, 2024