CAMPBELLs, LUGGs, & BLACKWELLs of Nelson, PA

A Guide to Searching This Website

Page 3 - Actual Searches of Our Website

(And How to Do Them Smarter)

Our Family History Website

Our family history website has more than 500 pages of old letters, photos, news clips, family records, etc. We've covered the basics of using our site's search engine, FreeFind.

And advanced search techniques, that may be useful to someone who does a lot of searches -- or who has very specific or very complex search needs.

This page, "Case Studies", covers actual searches people made, and discusses alternate search queries that might have produced better results for them.

Recap of What you learned from Pages 1 & 2 of this Guide

We learned to use FreeFind's two search boxes:

their Regular Search Box

and

their Advanced Search Box

The "regular" search box on the left [which is located in the upper left corner of our home page] can handle most of your search. The "advanced" search box on your right [which can be reached from a link in the regular search box] is useful when doing case sensitive searches, or when doing searches involving special characters, such as à, á, â, å, ã, æ, etc.

You learned 3 ways of searching for PHRASES:

Exact Match Phrases (uses "");
Phrases with a Few Intervening words (uses [ ]);
Phrases with More Intervening Words (uses { }).

You learned two "wildcard" symbols, ?, to stand for any one character; and * , to ignore word endings.

Lastly, you learned that:

OR is a default, i.e.the query Will Selph would find all pages that contain either the word 'will' OR the word 'selph';
+ or AND will do AND searches, i.e. the query will AND selph or the query +will +selph would retrieve all the pages that contain both the word 'will' AND the word 'selph';
- or NOT will exclude items from searches, i.e. the query hazlett -archibald would retrieve all the pages that contain the word 'hazlett' -- but not if they contain the word 'archibald'; and
Parentheses ( ) can be used to group search terms, e.g. (john Or james OR jane) AND (hazlett OR Campbell OR "middlebury center").

ACTUAL SEARCHES

Let's take a look at actual searches and see what we can learn from them. FreeFind gives us reports of actual searches. Not who made the searches, but it lists the queries.

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SINGLE WORD SEARCHES. A large % of the searches consist of just one word. Searching that way makes sense if you are new to our website and want to get a quick feel for how much we have about a particular surname. Or if you are searching for someone with an unusual given name or for a particular place.

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TWO WORD SEARCHES. Let's take a look at some actual examples and see what we can learn:

charles lugg - This works, but provides a lot of "chaff" along with the "wheat". It will list every page on our website that contains both the word 'Charles' and also the word 'Lugg' somewhere on the same page. But if we changed it to "charles lugg" - That would find too few. Probably the best bet would be [charles lugg]. Do you understand why?
charles luff - We all do "fat finger" typos from time to time.
Evelyn savey - I don't think she's mentioned on our web site. They were probably looking for Evelyn Eleanor SAVEY Cevette Lauren Rauner (1912 - 1980). Searching women's names can be tricky, especially if they've been married several times. A good query to look for her might be [evelyn savey] [evelyn cevette] [evelyn lauren] [evelyn rauner]. Does that make sense to you?
english company - That should work fairly well with the data on our website. But "english company" would be a better query.
"holy cross" - Very good. But those very familiar with variations of church names in England might have searched for "holy cross" holyrood.

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THREE WORD SEARCHES. Let's take a look at some of the user searches and see what we can learn from them:

charles f lugg - I suspect this is a typo, but they tried it three times, so perhaps the typo is in their database, not in the query.
charles b lugg - 'b' isn't a word, so there would be no matches for that part, just for the 'charles' and the 'lugg' "charles b. lugg" would work. But "charles b* lugg" would retrieve occurences of both 'Charles B. Lugg' and 'Charles Byron Lugg".
charles byron lugg - OK, but "charles byron lugg" is better.
"charles byron lugg" - Bravo!
george wallace buvk - Typed twice. Aside from the obvious typo, an OR query probably produces a lot of hits that are not of interest. Much better would be "george w* buck". But because so many men of that period just used initials for their first and second names, "g* w* buck" might be even better.
john blackwell will - Better would be [john blackwell] AND will or its equivalent, +[john blackwell] +will. His name often appears as 'John "Gentleman" Blackwell'.

Serial Searches

Here's an interesting example of a series of searches, which we partially discusses above:

Tue Jul 30 20:37:18 2019 guide
Tue Jul 30 20:35:19 2019 avening
Tue Jul 30 20:34:37 2019 avening
Tue Jul 30 20:33:44 2019 "holy cross"

What they were looking for was the page Guide to Holy Cross Church, Avening Gloucestershire -- but 3 separate searches is not the way to go.

The easiest way to find probably would be to use the menu on the left side of our home page. One of the menu choices is Misc. Documents. If you go there and scroll down, you'll come to the heading MISC. OTHER: and right below it is the link to the guide to Holy Cross church. Or, if you don't like to scroll or page down, use CTL-F to search that web page for 'guide' or 'avening' or 'holy cross'.

But if you want to use FreeFind to do the search, in the search box you could type +guide +avening +"holy cross".

What's Next?

This webpage will be updated from time to time as new reports of actual queries come in. When some searches are made that warrant new tips, we'll revise this page.

As of yet, none of our users have done NOT searches. As you may know, we have tons of Robert Luggs in our family tree. Suppose someone had lots of info on Robert Preston Lugg, but wanted to search for all the other Robert Luggs. One way to do that is the query [robert lugg] -"robert preston lugg". Or perhaps [robert lugg] -"robert p* lugg". Do you understand the difference as to what will satisfy each of those queries?

Remember, the more searches you do, the better you'll become at it.