* Tips on How to Search this Site

Our Search facility not only enables you to search through more than 150,000 digitised items in our catalogue, but also lets you find things in the Tracing Your Roots exhibition, the Migration History exhibition, the Stories contributed by our visitors and The Gallery.

If you do not know where to start but have a word or topic in mind, the Search form is a good place to start. For example, if you were interested in housing you could type this (but not in italics!) in as a keyword search and as long as you ensure that you search over the entire site (leave all the site section boxes unchecked) it will bring up hits in Tracing your Roots, Migration Histories, Stories, The Gallery and the catalogue all in one go.

Try this search now ...

You can find the basic Search form by following the 'search' link on the navigation bar at the top of every page on the Moving Here website.

There is also a link to it in the top right hand part of the homepage.

After you have typed in a search a hit list will be generated. Our search facility will return up to 250 search results. If what you are searching for matches more than 250 results you will see this message:

Your search found more than 250 hits. Only the first 250 hits are displayed below. You may improve your results if you refine your search

In this case it might be best to click on the refine you search link and go to the advanced search form and to add more detail. This should produce a more accurate search.

You can do this by adding more words in the Keywords box or using more specific Keywords (for example housing association instead of just housing), or by adding some dates, selecting a Contributor (Partner) or the part of the website you are interested in (for example Migration Histories, Tracing Your Roots or Stories). You may also wish to restrict your search by Community (Caribbean, Irish, Jewish or South Asian), Theme (Origins, Journeys, Settling or Reconnecting) or Format of the original resources (text, images, museum objects, films clips or sound recordings).

Keywords

Type your search words in this box.

Searching for a phrase?
You can search for several words in a phrase but to make sure the exact phrase you type in is searched for put your search terms in quotation marks.

For example:
"First World War" will find these three words occurring together as a phrase.

Moving Here will NOT find records with those words in a phrase if they are not in the exact same order you typed them in.

Combining individual search words together.
If there are no hits for a phrase you can break it down using fewer words linked together by the word AND.

You may link search words to form a more complicated search by using the words - 'AND' 'OR' & 'NOT' in between your search words.

These words are called Boolean operators when used in this way. These must be typed in capital letters in order to work.

For example:
Typing in Passenger AND List will find these two words when they appear anywhere in the same piece of text of a page or catalogue item. It will not necessarily mean these words are right next to each other as a phrase but at least they will appear somewhere together.

Typing in Passenger NOT List will find the word passenger wherever it appears without being near or next to the word list in the same piece of text of a page or catalogue item.

Typing in Passenger OR List will find either the words passenger or list occurring anywhere in the text of a page or catalogue item.

Unsure what to type into the keyword search box?
You can also use an asterisk (*) to perform what is called "wild card" searches. This means that if you are uncertain you can extend the likelihood of getting back some useful results.

For example:
Pass* will find any words that start with these letters, such as passenger, passengers, passage etc.
You cannot use brackets to build up complex searches.

Do I have to put in punctuation in my search?
You do not have to use any punctuation when typing in the words you want to search from. You do not need to put a full stop at the end or a question mark. Just type the words.

Moving Here searches on words that have hyphens in and also if you forget to put them.

Moving Here searches for acronyms (for example S.S. Windrush) whether you put the dots after the abbreviation letters or not (so you can type either SS Windrush or S.S. Windrush).

If there is a word using an apostrophe then you must put this in otherwise the search will not select the words you want (for example the name O'Brien must be written like this and not Obrien)

Searching for a name?
You can ONLY search for a name in those records where it is mentioned it in the catalogue record. There may be many other documents that have names in them once you download them and look at the digital version BUT if these names are not pulled out and described in the catalogue entry then you will not be able to type them in and search for them.

Names have been pulled out for you systematically from certain records such as:
Passenger lists 1948 - 1960 (BT 26)
Internees Indexes 1939 - 1942 (HO 396)
Irish Reproductive loans (T91)
Jews Free School admission registers.

Follow all the tips above but tick the 'Is your search for a person?' box to make sure the name you have searched for comes out at the top of the search results. This will not change which hits are returned, only the order in which they are displayed.
If you want to only search for a name in a particular type of record, such as a passenger list, then you can make sure it only searches those records by using AND.

For example:
King AND passenger will only bring up those mentions of someone with the name King in the passenger lists. It will not bring up any mention of the word king which appears elsewhere.

Abraham AND internees will only bring up mentions of someone with the name Abraham in the internees index. It will not bring up mention of the name Abraham which appears in the passenger lists or other records.

Searching for a reference?
If you are searching for a specific reference make sure you have it typed in correctly with the right spaces and slashes or dots in it.

Just as when you are searching a keyword you can use an asterisk (*) at the end if you know the beginning of a reference but not the full reference.

For example:
BT* will bring up BT26/1233/001 as well as BT26/1234/0010 among others
SC/PH* will bring up SC/PHL/01/035/SB4105 as well as SC/PHL/02/1270/1076 and many more.

Regular or Fuzzy Search
On Moving Here you can perform either a regular or a fuzzy search. A regular search will return ONLY the exact records and pages which contain the keywords that you search for. For example if you entered the keywords "Jews Free School" it will only return hits with ALL of these words in the item. If however you choose to run a fuzzy search then all items which contain ANY of the keywords you entered will be returned. If you are looking for specific items then it is best to run a regular search. If however you wish to see as many items as possible relating to some keywords you are better off running a fuzzy search.
Community
The resources in Moving Here are currently indexed by four communities - Caribbean, Irish, Jewish and South Asian. To restrict your search to a particular community, choose one of these options from the drop-down list.
Theme
The resources in Moving Here are indexed by our four Themes - Origins (Being There), Journeys (Moving Here), Settling (Being Here) and Reconnecting (Reconnecting with the country of origin). To restrict your search to resources about a single theme, choose one of these options from the drop-down list.
Year Range
To limit your search to resources from specific years, enter dates in the 'year from' and 'year to' dates that span your required year range. You should only enter four-digit years in these boxes (for example, 1945) as we cannot currently search for more precise dates which include days and months.
Format
This is the format of the original resource that has been digitised for Moving Here. For example, if the original item is a photograph it will be described as an image. If the original is a tape recording it will be described as audio. You may search for catalogue items in one or more formats. For example, there may be an item which is a written document with images in it. This would mean that it comes under text and image.
Selecting a format to search on will automatically restrict your search to the Moving Here Catalogue rather than allowing you to search the entire site. Our Stories, exhibition and galleries pages do not have an 'original format' for you to search by.
Contributor (Partner)
The Contributor is the name of the Partner that contributed each resource to Moving Here. The partners are thirty local, regional and national museums, libraries and archives. To look for resources contributed by a particular partner, choose the name of their organization from the drop-down box. To learn more about the partners, what they do and how you can access their collections see our partners page.
Site Section
The Moving Here site is divided into the following sections:
The Moving Here Catalogue describes material contributed by our partners. This material is digitised and available for you to search and download, free of charge, from this site.
The Stories describes people's experiences of migration. You may also wish to contribute your own story to this area of the site.
The Tracing your Roots Gallery explains how you may use the resources available from this site, together with those held by organizations around the world, to trace your family history.
The Migration Histories Gallery tells the story of the migration of people from the four key Moving Here communities to England over the past 200 years.
The Gallery presents selected visual and audio highlights from the Moving Here Catalogue. Topics such as food, sport, style, war and romance are covered.

help index Back to Help Index