What you can include in your Search One or more 'search terms', of 3 or more characters long; and as is customary with search engines, common terms such as 'it', 'and', 'the', 'that'... etc. will be excluded from the search, except when specified as part of a phrase. You can search for a phrase by enclosing it in double quotes - for example, "liver and white". Or omit the quotes and use the selection box above the search button to 'Search for Exact PHRASE only'. You can select your search to be Case-Sensitive - that is, results will match the capitalisation of the term(s) you supply. The default is case-insensitive - so 'white' also matches 'WHITE', and 'White'. The search is performed for whole words only; however searching can be expanded with wildcards (*) and (?). Use * to match any number of letters, and '?' to match a single letter, for example: This will search for Joseph, Josp, or Joshua, with a surname of White (or Whyte); or to take it even further, 'wh*t' will match 'whyatt' or 'wheelwright'. Soundex - New in December 2008   Basic Soundex Encoding Searching can be further enhanced by using the 'Soundex' option, a check-box on the search form. Choosing this function will search for words sounding similar to the ones you supply. The algorithm I'm using is a simple one. Each word is converted to a 4-character code comprising its initial letter, and 3 numbers representing the remaining letters, ignoring repeated letters, vowels, and the letters 'h', 'w' and 'y'. So for example the code for 'Sarah' is 'S600', and for 'Joseph' 'J210'. The equivalences are: b, f, p, v = 1 c, g, j, k, q, s, x, z = 2 d, t = 3 l = 4 m, n = 5 t = 6 Limitations A feature to be aware of when using this algorithm is that unexpected combinations can produce the same code - for example 'WHITE' and 'WOOD' are both 'W300', but you can't use '+White -Wood' to exclude 'Wood' from the results. Well you can try, but it will have no effect. The converse is that some surnames which you'd like to group together do NOT have the same code - for example HANCOCK ('H522') and HANDCOCK ('H532'). Welcome to the world of Family History... The initial letter in standard Soundex encoding is always upper case, however I have modified this behaviour to make searching for upper case surnames possible, as otherwise searching for "moseley" would also return pages containing "michael", since they both have the same basic code - 'M240'. So to use Soundex most effectively on pages where surnames are capitalised (for example the Memorial Inscription pages), use 'case sensitive' for your search, and please supply the surname you're searching for as UPPER CASE, for example: Another way round the limitation is to search for a case-insensitive soundex 'phrase', for example: This will correctly return pages containing the name "Michael Mosely" in either upper, lower, or mixed case. Partial Searches   Also new in December 2008 is the ability to search parts of the site. The various areas can be selected from the main search form, and include: Memorial Inscriptions - 400+ pages of gravestone inscriptions from 16 counties. Photographs - mainly of churches, from several counties in England and Wales. By county - select from Breconshire, Cheshire, Derbyshire, Gloucestershire, Herefordshire, Monmouthshire, Shropshire, Staffordshire, Wiltshire, or Worcestershire. For Advanced Users Add + in front of terms/phrases that MUST appear in results. Pages which do not contain these terms/phrases will be excluded, regardless of whatever other terms are present. This would be the same as choosing 'Match ALL the above Words' if used alone, but it can be used with greater effect in conjunction with excluding terms, for example: Add - in front of terms/phrases that MUST NOT appear in results. Pages which do contain these terms/phrases will be excluded, regardless of whatever other terms are present. Note: the search logic will not return results based exclusively on words which are NOT present, so if you EXCLUDE terms, you will need to provide other terms to select by. Excluding terms is useful only to filter results obtained by a positive selection. Weights can be applied by adding a value <2-10000> in front of terms or phrases, for example: Scores for documents containing 'goddard' will be multiplied by 10, and for those for 'family history' by 50. Matches for documents containing 'genealogy' will be unchanged. The weight must be in the range of 2-10000. Add + (inclusion) in front of weights when terms must be present. Results will always be displayed in weighted order. The Score is the percentage of matching characters in a document: document length/(matches * length of search term * weighting) *100. Information which will be excluded from your Search Common terms such as 'it', 'and', 'the', 'that'... etc. In addition terms which occur in over 90% of files are also excluded from the search. On this site these include (for example) 'lockie' and 'genuki'. Punctuation and most other non-alphanumeric characters. When searching for an exact phrase, a word-break is up to 5 non-word characters - so '-' is recognised correctly as a word-separator. An apostrophe 's is not significant - that is, 'white' matches both “white” and “white's”. Foreign characters such as à, β, ç, δ, é...etc. are excluded, but they will match their English equivalents - a, b, c, d, e, etc. So if you're wondering how many pages mention "Thomas á Becket", you may be pleasantly surprised to learn there are 19.

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Case Sensitive Soundex Matching Search Whole siteMemorial InscriptionsPhotographsBreconshire pagesCheshire pagesDerbyshire pagesGloucestershire pagesHerefordshire pagesMonmouthshire pagesShropshire pagesStaffordshire pagesWiltshire pagesWorcestershire pages Match ALL the above WordsMatch ANY of the above WordsSearch for Exact PHRASE only Sort by MatchesScoreDateSizeTitleURL Show 5102550100 results per page

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