We have turned on some more search features for you. Firstly, you can now use a ‘leading wildcard’ (i.e include a wildcard as the first letter of the name). This is helpful as the initial character of names is more liable to be mistranscribed.

Secondly, we have increased the range of dates that you can search: you can now search +/- 5 years on Date of Marriage and +/- 10 years on Date of Birth.

More goodies coming next week - keep your eyes peeled.

We’re very excited to tell you that we have started unlocking the search features.

You can now search using wildcards, or using the “name starting with” feature. To try these out, go to “Search” and click on the “Show advanced fields” button at the bottom.

Both these features will give you a lot more flexibility. For example, I just searched for all footballers in England starting with S.

Wildcards are very useful if you are unsure of a spelling - you can substitute any or all of the parts of a name with a “*”. Searching for “R*B*T*S*” would give you a huge number of variants including Roberts,  Robertson, Rabbits, Reblatts and more. “AN*T*” will find Anthony, Annette, Antony, Anita and many more variations.

N.B You cannot search using a wildcard as the first character yet, but we will switch this on soon. Keep an eye on this blog for updates.

Coming soon - a variants search: this finds variants of first names and surnames. A variant search for Elizabeth would find you Liz, Eliza, Liza, Betty, Betsy, Beth and more

For more on search features, read this earlier post: http://blog.1911census.co.uk/2009/01/extra-search-features-coming-after-launch/

A lot of people have fed back that searching the census is not as flexible as it could be! There’s a good reason for that - at the moment some search functions are deliberately restricted. This is to allow the site to deal with more queries immediately after it goes online in 2009, when it is expected that there will be huge demand from people trying to access the service. 

The majority of people will be able to find at least some of their ancestors with the current search options. However, as soon as the demand has  stabilised, we will release updates to the site to turn on searching with wildcards (including an initial wildcard), provide NameThesaurus variants, and will also lift the restriction that requires users  to use a surname for a person search or a street name for the address search. When these restrictions are relaxed it will be *much* easier to find the more elusive ancestors.

Sorry we can’t open these up to you for the moment - however, we need to test the site as it will be at launch. We will email everybody who is registered on the site the moment new features become available after launch, so make sure you register.