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General => The Common Room => Topic started by: PaulStaffs on Saturday 05 June 10 19:38 BST (UK)
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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. :D
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.
(http://www.historia.drivehq.com/images/1.jpg)
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).
(http://www.historia.drivehq.com/images/2.jpg).
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...
(http://www.historia.drivehq.com/images/3.jpg).
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)
(http://www.historia.drivehq.com/images/4.jpg)
6 Copy and paste the formula into each row that contains data.
(http://www.historia.drivehq.com/images/5.jpg)
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!
(http://www.historia.drivehq.com/images/6.jpg)
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
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Thank you Paul. It always amazes me what people can work out. I didn't know you could anything like that with FreeBMD. I've copied and saved your instructions.
Lizzie
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Thanks Paul. Very helpful. Up until now it is very annoying when you type in a search and it says The server is busy.
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Thanks for that - I hadn't noticed you could download from Freebmd. Very ingenious little spreadsheet you have worked out there.....
Stating the obvious here - just to save anyone thinking they are going mad when it doesn't work ;) .... but it will only work on the later FreeeBMD death entires that have ages included!
Milly ;D
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Thank you very much for this; it's going to save so much time and frustration!
Any more useful tips, please? :P
Thanks again
Morgan
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Any more useful tips, please?
An obvious one if you have your data in a spreadsheet:
Try a search for a death in any county of Samuel Davies with no dates and it'll return 2,500+ results (there's a limit of 3000 displayable results on FreeBMD so it's no good trying it on John Smith!).
You can download/open/tidy as above then sort it on the 'District' (or District and Age, or District and Year) to get all the relevant results grouped together. Try the above search then sort by two columns, Distict and Age. If Mr Davies is thought to have died in Cardiff, Cardigan or Carmarthen it'll be much easier to see likely candidates.
You can get the same effect by using multiple choices when you search FreeBMD and using CTRL+f in your browser to 'find' amongst the results but IMHO...
1 It's much easier to view them all when sorted in a spreadsheet
2 You can save it and come back to it anytime (offline too)
3 You can sort the results by Age, District, Year... or any combination
I haven't tried this one but it occurs to me that you could search for a marriage using the surnames in opposite order (eg Taylor, Green as spouse then Green, Taylor as spouse) download each set of results then contrive to get the spreadsheet to match them up. Might save a lots of clicks ;)
I'm sure there are lots of other applications for those times when there are 'too many' results to trawl through.
Paul
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Can I just ask one thing please?
Will you come and do my searching for me... :) :) :)as my brain is toooo addled :-[ ::)to take this in... so its the long hard simple slog..for me... I know you have explained it extremely well... but I am from the back of the class and 'no comprendi'!!!! :-\
I will print it off and read it 25 times just before I go to bed... that may help.. ;D ;D
xin
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I will print it off and read it 25 times just before I go to bed... that may help.. ;D ;D
xin
LOL I doubt it Xin ;D ;D ;D
They could be talking in Double Dutch for all I know.
In fact I think they are !
Carol
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tg 4 that, I thought it was just me ;D ;D ;D
xin
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:D
Basically it's just...
1 downloading the search results from FreeBMD
2 opening the file in a spreadsheet
3 typing in then copy/pasting a formula
4 choosing 'sort' from the menu.
Paul
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:D
Basically it's just...
1 downloading the search results from FreeBMD
2 opening the file in a spreadsheet
3 typing in then copy/pasting a formula
4 choosing 'sort' from the menu.
Paul
it's very cool! Thanks Paul