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Note - This is one of a series of pages on how to search the On-Line London Gazette. It is highly recommended that you start at the index to the series and work through the lessons in the correct order.
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Problems with words at the end of a line |
Go back to the page with Major Heffernan and Major Gribble (Gazette Issue 31370, dated 30 May 1919, page 30 of 132)
Look at the top of left of the page, and find the following entry:
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Here is the same entry, copied and pasted into a wordprocessor:
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Capt. (T./Lt.-Col.)
Victor Leopold Spencer Cowley, M.C., R. Iri Rif., attd. 31st Bn., M.G. Corps. |
Apart from "Ir." having been translated as "Iri", the entry seems to have "translated" well. Without the typographical errors which plaque the database, at first sight it would appear that we should be able to do a search for "Victor Leopold Spencer Cowley" without any problems.
Go to the initial search page and type victor leopold spencer cowley into the search box. There are no hits.
Try searching for leopold spencer cowley instead. No, it doesn't find him.
Let's try searching for spencer cowley. No, it still doesn't find the entry.
How about spencer all by itself? Surely it must find him? If you want to try this, it will say that it has found 1239 editions that contain the word "Spencer". However closer examination reveals that it still does not find the entry for Captain Cowley! It does find a mention of the name in the same issue as we've been looking at, but it's on another page.
The above example is a good illustration
of the end-of-line problem. The search engine simple does not
seem to be able to find some words that occur at the end of a
line.
Instead, it treats the last word of one line as being part of
the first word on the next line. In our example...
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Capt. (T./Lt.-Col.)
Victor Leopold Spencer Cowley, M.C., R. Iri Rif., attd. 31st Bn., M.G. Corps. |
...the search engine joins "Spencer" to "Cowley" to make one word - "spencercowley", and just searching for plain spencer won't pick him up. Similarly, searching for cowley won't find him either - you have to look for "spencercowley".
Again it's time to put this to the test. Go back to the initial search page and search for spencercowley. It works, and brings up two hits:
The first of these entries, for 30th May 1919, is what we are looking for - the search engine has now found him!
If you have a look at the 1917 edition, we get the following entry:
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In plain text, this translates to:
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Capt. (A /Maj )
Victor Leopold Spencer Cowley, R. Ir Rif., attd M.G. Corps |
Note that Spencer appears at the end of one line, and Cowley at the beginning of the other, exactly like the 1919 example that we've been dealing with.
There are three ways to try to get round this end-of-line problem. The first is to search for parts of the name, not the full name. For "Victor Leopold Spencer Cowley" a search for victor leopold would work.
The second is to make multiple searches, joining names together in case one of the forenames appears at the end of a line, followed by another forename or a surname at the beginning of the next line. For "Victor Leopold Spencer Cowley" you could try searching for victor leopold spencercowley or victorleopold spencer cowley or victor leopoldspencer cowley. The first of these would work in our case, but not the other two.
Another way round the problem is to put a wild-card character at the end of a forename or surname to search for the name followed by any number of characters. In this search engine an asterisk * is used. We have already found that a search for victor leopold spencer won't work, because the surname is treated as "spencercowley". However a search for victor leopold spencer* will work, because entering spencer* will find words that begin with "spencer", including "spencersmith", "spencerjones" and "spencercowley". Try it!
Note that the end-of-line problem sometimes doesn't affect lines which end in a comma or period. If the entry had been written as...
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Capt. (A /Maj )
Victor Leopold Spencer Cowley, Royal. Ir Rif., attd M.G. Corps |
...then we would have found him if we had searched for victor leopold spencer cowley - the "Cowley" wouldn't have been joined to the "Royal" on the next line. A punctuation mark at the end of the line sometimes acts as a terminator, and stops the words joining together.
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