Although this is a bit technical it's more 'technique' than technical help so I hope Common Room is the best place for it...
This is a technique I've used when searching for people on FreeBMD when I've known an approximate birth year but had no real idea of date of death or where the name is very common or can be spelled in various ways.
If your search returns hundreds of results it's a much quicker way of isolating likely candidates rather than looking at year of death and age and calculating year of birth.
Although it looks a bit involved at first it takes just a few seconds once you get used to it and can save you hours.
In this example I'm looking for Henry Holland b1847 and FreeBMD gave me about 430 results between 1881 and 1930 (last known and latest likely dates).
1 On your search results page click the download button near the top.
2 Save the file to your computer - it'll be saved as 'search.txt' in the default location.
3 Open search.txt in a spreadsheet (choose 'Tab' as the separator rather than comma or fixed width etc if the program asks).
.
You might be able to open search.txt via a right-click and choose 'open with...' or open it from your spreadsheet's File menu.
4 Column A of the sheet isn't needed so delete it. There are also rows at top and bottom that aren't needed, delete those too but leave the column titles.
Make column A narrower, you should end up with something like this...
.
Delete the blank row below the titles.
5 In the column after 'Page' enter a new title, say, 'Variance'. In the first cell under the title enter a formula like this...
=B2-E2-xxxx
Replace xxxx with the year of birth of the person you're looking for. In this example I've used 1847 and the formula displays a result of '30' (i.e. 1881 - 4 - 1847)
6 Copy and paste the formula into each row that contains data.
7 Select all data in the sheet and sort it on the Variance column in ascending order (in OpenOffice 'Sort' is in the 'Data' menu).
8 Look down the right-hand column - those entries with the smallest variance (-1, 0, 1) are most likely to be the person you're looking for!
You can re-run the procedure with name and date variations and analyse the results in a few seconds.
Hope someone finds that useful!
Paul
