Searching The GazetteHints and tips

Paul Relfe

• News

• Immediate free text search from the home page

• 4 sections, with bespoke content and search features

All notices – search options

• Free text search box

• Notice type checklist

• Notice code

• Location

• Publication date

• Gazette edition

1998 – Current Gazette Service

•Notice codes

•Postcode(s), towns, addresses

•People – first, middle and surnames

•Company names

•Company types

•Legislation

Archive Content – everything pre-98

• Text is unstructured

• Contains typical Optical Character

Recognition (OCR) errors

• Does not include metadata related

to the contents

Archive Content – what is searchable?

• Issue number

• Dates

• ‘Notice type’ is unusable

• 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

• 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

Searching the WW1 archives

• Specific section in Awards and Accreditations

• Only holds records from WW1

• WW1 medals resource

• By oldest first

• By latest first

• Relevance

• Default

Ordering your results

• “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

• Narrow date range with broad search terms

• Narrow date range with no search terms

• Wider date range for older events

Date ranges

• 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

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’

• 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

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’

• Name

• Rank

• Regiment

• Date

• Regimental Service Number (pre-1920)

• Unique Service Number (post- 1920)

Tracking an individual by promotions

• 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

• 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

• 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

• 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

• 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

• 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

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

Any questions?