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This web site search engine (an opensource product called ht://Dig) is both a blessing and a curse. It allows you to look for just about anything, including
"incidental names" which are not part of the Surname Index, but
- if your search criteria is too broad (i.e., try looking for Peters!) then you could get
hundreds or thousands of results to look through, which may not be the best use of your time.
- you may have to try various forms of the name or place you are looking for to find all possible matches (for example,
names can be spelled various ways (e.g., Jemima and Jemimia; Carle, Carl and Carll)).
Soundex searching is not available at this time.
- some punctuation like periods, dashes, apostrophes, dollar signs, square brackets, etc. is ignored. This is generally
a great idea, but does mean that sometimes you get more results than you want (for example, if you search for
Andrew's you will get results where a page contains "Andrews" or "Andrew's").
- the minimum size of a word that is indexed is 3 characters. This means that you can't search for words like
abbreviations that are less than three characters long after the periods are removed (e.g., N.B., N.Y.)
This web site tries to limit the use of abbreviations that can't be searched for.
- Phrase Matching and Near Matching options are not available at this time. This means if your search criteria is,
for example, Samuel Peters, then you will get results which include "Samuel Peters", "Samuel Leonard Peters, and
"Samuel James Peters", etc. but you will also get results where a page contains "Samuel Jones" and "John Peters". The
matching is done on Any or All individual words you specify.
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