Searching by place

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logan
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Searching by place

Post by logan »

One of the search options is to restrict searches by place, e.g., Poland or Krakow. This place restriction currently means that sources will be included in the search only if they cover a geographic region equal to or included in the selected place. For example, if you restrict your search to Krakow, business directories covering all of Poland will not be included, but if you restrict your search to Poland, business directories covering only Krakow will be included. Also, yizkor books have not yet been categorized by place internally, so they are not included in any place-restricted searches.

In the future, the Krakow section of an all-Poland business directory might be included in the Krakow-restricted search, but this will not generally be possible, because not all sources contain place "sections" for each place they cover. Some sources are organized first by occupation or surname, for example.

Therefore, if you are only interested in results from a particular place, the recommended search strategy is:

1) Search without any place-restrictions or only a country-level (e.g., Poland) restriction, and use the source titles and source section indicators(if present) in the results as a guide for relevancy. If so many results are returned that this is not practical, then

2) Search with the desired place restriction, if such a place restriction exists (typically, only for major cities or regions), and also search without any place-restriction, but with the place name appended to your search result (e.g., Kalter Lancut to find people with surname Kalter in Lancut). The latter method of searching will sometimes work, because, if multiple words are present in your search term, all must appear on the same page in a source, in order for that page to match. Sometimes, however, this method will not work, because the place, while appearing on the same page, appears in a different entry (e.g., for a different person) than the rest of your search term. So, if 1) above did not work, you should also

3) Manually explore sources of potential interest to see if they are organized or even indexed by place, in which case, if the place is small enough, you can manually search the place section.

If volunteers manually create place indices for sources, other options for searching by place will become available.

-Logan
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