How does All Records work?

 ‘All Records’ searches all of our records (except for Living Relatives) and tells you how many results there are for the name you’ve searched for in each of our record collections.

You can search for a specific person by including their ‘birth year’ and/or ‘death year’, or you can search more broadly if you enter a ‘last name’ and (optionally) a ‘first name’.

The search fields

You will need to enter a ‘last name’ to run a search, but the other fields are optional. Wildcards cannot be used, but if you tick the ‘include variants’ tick-box, diminutives of the name you are searching will be included in your results. For example, if you search for the last name ‘Miller’ with ‘include variants’ ticked, you will receive results for the name ‘Millar’ as well.

Entering a first name may make your search results more manageable. As with forenames, you can tick the ‘include variants’ tick-box, which can prove particularly useful for census records, where first names are often abbreviated (for instance, Charles may appear as Chas, or George as Geo, and so on).

Results

Your results are grouped by record collection. Scroll down the results list to see how many matches were found within each collection.
There are two types of result:

Record collections that offer ‘Record’ results can be fully searched by name. Records results mean either that there are definite matches for the name you’ve entered, or (where the records only include a first initial), that there may be matches for your chosen name. For example, if you searched for ‘James Smith’, record results may also list records for ‘J Smith’.

Record collections that offer  ‘Page’ results have not been transcribed in full. The records are held on a set of name and date-indexed pages. To discover whether the name you’ve searched for appears for a particular date, you will need to view (and check) the relevant page or pages. It is possible – particularly with less common names – that a page result contains no entries for the name you searched for.  

Viewing results

Results appear in the form of a link, such as ‘603 pages’ or ‘315 records’. Click the link to see a summary of individual results for that record collection. You can then decide which (if any) of the individual results you want to view.

Redefining your search

Once you have viewed a particular record collection’s results, clicking the ‘redefine search’ link will let you redefine your search within that collection.

Returning to the ‘All Records’ results page

If you want to return to your ‘All Records’ search results, click the ‘all search results’ link, with its backward-pointing arrow, at the bottom of the page.