Search Tips

 Leave the Exclude box empty for the first search.

 Put a very short search in first, like an "a" to see if we have any information in the county you are
searching.  Hopefully it will come back with at least 200 hits to indicate there is plenty of data.
Then you can put in a more refined search.

 Enter short, partial words in the Include box.  For instance, if you are searching for Huffman, put in
"huf", or put in "huf man".  That would include anything with "huf" AND "man" in it.

 You might want to include a date in your search, i.e. put "/1942" or just "1942" in the Include box.
Perhaps "huf 1942".
 
 
 

 The search engine for this site is not like Google or many other search sites you may use.  The main
difference is the 4th box (Include box) is an AND search on the search items to be included in the
search, and the 5th box (Exclude box) is an OR search on the search items to be excluded from
the search.

 The "Include" search box is box #4.  You must have something in this search box or nothing will be returned.
The program will only return records (lines) that have ALL the items entered in the Include box.  The separate
records to search for are all separated by a single space.  The search is case insensitive, so it doesn't matter if you
enter lower case or uper case letters.  It is not possible at this time to search for all capital letters in a last name.

 If the Include box (4th Box) contains:

abe g

you will get a listing of every line in the county database you are searching that has "abe" AND "ver" in it.  So you
will get "Abegail", but not "Mabel", unless the Mabel line has another word with a "g" in it.  The output prints the
whole line if it matches ALL of the search terms and doesn't have any of the Exclude items.

 The "Exclude" search box is box #4.  The program will exclude records (lines) that have ANY of the items
entered in the Exclude box.  The separate records to search for are all separated by a single space.  The
search is case insensitive, so it doesn't matter if you enter lower case or uper case letters.  It is common
to leave this box empty so nothing is excluded.

 If the Exclude box (4th Box) contains:

be ve

then any line in the county database you are searching that has "be" OR "ve" in it will be excluded from the search.
So this would exclude Betty, Dave, Elizabeth, Beverly, etc.

 Remember, the Includes and Excludes act on everything on a database record line, not just the name of the person.
 
 

Wild Cards and Other Special Search Techniques

 . - A period can stand for any character.  So searching for ".lack" will return Black, Flack, Plack, etc.  You can have
multiple periods in your search.  To search for a period, enter a backslash before the period (i.e.  \ . )

 [] - Enclosing characters in square brackets allows for multiple possible matches on a single character.  So searching
for "b[ae]rt" will return Bart, Bert, Albert, Bartholomew, etc.  It will not match Baerting.  You can have more than
2 letters within the square brackets.  To search for a bracket, enter a backslash before the bracket (i.e.  \[ )

 \b - \b is a word boundary.  So searching for "\bbart" will match Bart or Bartholomew, but will not match Albert,
since Albert does not have a word boundary before the "b", but has a letter instead.  A word boundard does not have to
be a space.  It can be a "(" as in (Bert Williams).

 Anything included in parentheses is a literal, case insensitive search that must contain (or exclude) that exact phrase,
including any spaces.  So if you put
 

be "edith v" ve

in the Include box (4th Box), you will get any line in the county database that has "be" OR "edith v" OR "ve" in it.
 
 

 Send any comments to
uspeopleinfo@mflan.com