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How to find information in the World War I Service Records - Army and Navy collection
There are 2 ways to find information in this collection:
- search for particular names by clicking the Search button
- browse documents by Names A-Z by clicking the Names A-Z button
How to search for particular names
From the search page, you make a query in these simple steps:
- Specify the names of people or locations, or dates you want to search
- Say whether you want to search for all or just some of the word
- Type in the words you want to search for
- Click the Begin Search button
When you make a query, a list of twenty matching documents will be shown. There is a button at the end to take you on to the next twenty documents. From there you will find buttons to take you on to the third twenty or back to the first twenty, and so on. Click the name to see it.
Name Results All name results in browsing and searching result in the following sequence: Last Name First Name Middle Name
Search terms
Whatever you type into the query box is interpreted as a list of words or phrases called "search terms." A term is a single word containing only letters and digits, or a phrase consisting of a sequence of words enclosed in double quotes ("..."). Terms are separated by white space. If any other characters such as punctuation appear, they serve to separate terms just as though they were spaces. And then they are ignored. You can't search for words that include punctuation.
For example, the query
- Kealoha-Adamson, Kimo
will be treated the same as
- Kealoha Adamson Kimo
Query type
There are two different kinds of query.
- Queries for all of the words. These look for documents (or
chapters, or titles) that contain all the words you have specified.
Documents that satisfy the query are displayed, in build order.
- Queries for some of the words. Just list some terms that are
likely to appear in the documents you are looking for. Documents are
displayed in order of how closely they match the query. When determining
the degree of match,
- the more search term occurrences a document contains, the closer it matches;
- terms which are rare in the collection as a whole are more important than common ones;
- short documents match better than long ones.
Use as many search terms as you like--first, middle and last names. If you specify only one term, documents will be ordered by its frequency of occurrence.