Search the Repository
Some Important Notes About This Search Engine!! This type of search is called a Boolean search, which is just a fancy way of saying that you can be more particular about how you want the database searched. There are a handful of operators that you can use with this type of search, but there are three primary ones that should suit all of your needs.
1.) The first is the wildcard operator, an asterisk (*), which is commonly used to find parts of whole words. For example, if you search for Frank*, it will return both Frank and Franklin and even Frankenstein. The * can also go at the beginning of a word to find something ending in a particular style, such as *son, which would return Sampson, Johnson, Jackson, etc. You can also use it both at the beginning and end of a value, such as *son*, which would return results like Sampsonite and Jacksonville.
2.) The second is the plus sign (+), which when prefixed to a value will tell the search engine that this word must be present in every match. For example, if you search for George +Brown, the results will be every record that has Brown in it, but may or may not have George. If you want only the results for every "George Brown" in the database, you would need to put a + on both names, e.g. +George +Brown.
3.) The final operator are quotation marks (""). If you are looking for a particular phrase, enclose it in the quotes to force the engine to look for the phrase as a whole instead of looking for the individual words. For example, if you searched for "sheriff of Chatham", the results would only pull records that contain that exact phrase, such as "G. J. Williams was the sheriff of Chatham County from 1865 to 1874."
Finally, one of the beauties about this type of search is that you can combine these operators in one query. For example, if I were searching for the previous fella, who sometimes went by "G.J.", sometimes went by "G. Jackson" and others went by "George J." and I knew he lived in Chatham, but didn't know anything about him, I would search for +G* J* +Williams +"Chatham County".
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