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Searching The GazetteHints and tips
Paul Relfe
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• News
• Immediate free text search from the home page
• 4 sections, with bespoke content and search features
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All notices – search options
• Free text search box
• Notice type checklist
• Notice code
• Location
• Publication date
• Gazette edition
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1998 – Current Gazette Service
•Notice codes
•Postcode(s), towns, addresses
•People – first, middle and surnames
•Company names
•Company types
•Legislation
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Archive Content – everything pre-98
• Text is unstructured
• Contains typical Optical Character
Recognition (OCR) errors
• Does not include metadata related
to the contents
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Archive Content – what is searchable?
• Issue number
• Dates
• ‘Notice type’ is unusable
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• Accuracy is approximately 99.9%
• Errors not found and corrected in the original text
• “Olde English” ligatures (such as the long S which resembles an ‘f’)
• Misinterpretation of punctuation
• confusion between l, i and l, 0 and O etc.
Optical Character Recognition (OCR) issues
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• Double inverted commas best way to search exact terms
• Boolean operators AND, NOT and OR
• “Arthur AND Splinn OR Smith”
• ‘Arthur Smith NOT Winstanley’
Narrowing your search
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Searching the WW1 archives
• Specific section in Awards and Accreditations
• Only holds records from WW1
• WW1 medals resource
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• By oldest first
• By latest first
• Relevance
• Default
Ordering your results
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• “Arthur James Smith”• “Arthur J. Smith”• “A. J. Smith”• “A. James Smith”• “Arthur Smith”• “Smith, [service number] A. J.”• “Smith, [service number] A.”• “Smith, [service number] Arthur J.”• “Smith, [rank], A. J.”• “Smith, [rank], A.”• “Smith, [rank], Arthur J.”
Name Searches – try all possibilities
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• Narrow date range with broad search terms
• Narrow date range with no search terms
• Wider date range for older events
Date ranges
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• Publication date of the ‘main’ London Gazette with which the Supplement was issued and not the date of the supplement itself
• May not tally up with War Office records, medal cards or other references to Gazetting on a specific date
Supplement searches
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Index Search
• Useful to narrow down information
• Search for an event in a 3 month time period
• Due to go live imminently
• Find the new search under ‘Publications’
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• https://www.thegazette.co.uk/{Edition}/index/year/{year}/volume/{volume}
• {Edition} = London/Belfast or Edinburgh• {Year} = Relevant year• {Volume} = It will be 1, 2, 3, or 4, as four volumes are published each
year for each quarter.
• Volume 4 of the London Gazette Index for 1909 needs the following URL:
• https://www.thegazette.co.uk/London/index/year/1909/volume/4
Index Search
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Missing editions
• Some editions of The Gazette are missing from the online archive
• A list of the missing editions will be going live imminently
• Find the list under ‘Resources’
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• Name
• Rank
• Regiment
• Date
• Regimental Service Number (pre-1920)
• Unique Service Number (post- 1920)
Tracking an individual by promotions
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• Mentioned in Despatches in the Supplement to the London Gazette on 28 January 1916
• Mention in Despatches in the Supplement to the London Gazette on the 1st of June 1917
• Distinguished Service Order in the Supplement to the Edinburgh Gazette on the 4th June 1917
Example - Charles Frederick Denman Cook
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• Naturalisation - private Act of Parliament
• Denization
• Only applies to powerful and connected people
• Doesn’t apply to groups who weren’t allowed to take oath
• “List of Aliens” – 1886-1981
Naturalisations
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• 1914 – present - all enrolled deed polls advertised in the Gazette
• Tiny percentage of deed polls are enrolled – approx. 300 per year vs. 60,000+ total
• Foreigners had to register name changes in Gazette 1919 - 1971
• Search terms - “deed poll was enrolled”
• Search terms - “have renounced and abandoned”
Changes of name
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• Honours system has changed a lot over the years
• Sometimes OCR errors, e.g. “…v1ctoria cross…”
• Gazettes medal guide -
• When medals were introduced• What they were awarded for• How many in total
Medal Searches
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• Variation between the date of ‘Gazetting’ and the publication date of the main Gazette
• Vague or common search terms - ‘John Smith’
• The user’s date-range information may be too broad or narrow
• Searching on the basis of a vague name and event only
• No unique identifier or incorrect unique identifier
• The information and references that users have obtained elsewhere may be only partial, incorrect or out of date
Why you may be unable to find content in The Gazette
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• Non-adherence to a particular ‘form’ or ‘style’
• Accuracy of the person submitting notices to be Gazetted
• Peculiarities of written English in a time when spellings were not standardised
• Quality of some of the old copies and the print machinery in use at the time
• Scanning and OCR errors
• Missing editions
Points to be aware of when searching The Gazette
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To recap….
Start from the ‘All notices’ section
Use ‘latest’ or ‘oldest’ filters to refine the search
Click the ‘clear all’ button to start a new search Remember to ‘UPDATE’ your
resultsUse the indexes
Try as many different permutations of an individual’s name as possible
Check it’s not a missing edition
Use double quotation marks
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Any questions?