If you enter one or more keywords into the search box without ticking any of the categories or centuries, a Google-like search on the entire Archives will take place. If you pause for a second or two after typing, the “hits” that you will get in each category and century will shown dynamically, and the results will be shown at the bottom of this page.

To search on a phrase rather than a single word, enclose your phrase in double quotes.  Search results do not depend on how you capitalise keywords.

By default, the search will identify Archive entries which include ALL of the keywords that you enter.  For example, if you enter Holdsworth the search will return all entries with the word Holdsworth.  If you enter Holdsworth Seale your search wll return only the entries that contain the word Holdsworth AND contain the word Seale.  However if your search with multiple keywords would return zero results, the system will try again with an implied “or” – so for example if you enter Auckland Rotorua, it would return all entries containing either the word Auckland OR the word Rotorua.  You can force the system to use an “or” rather than “and” by typing OR between the words – so the search Holdsworth OR Seale would return all entries containing either Holdsworth or Seale.  You can put a minus sign before a word to force the search to exclude items containing the word, so the search Holdsworth -Seale would return all entries including Holdsworth that do not have the word Seale. Another example: the search Newcomen -“Newcomen Road” would return all entries including Newcomen that do not have the phrase Newcomen Road.

The ? character matches a single letter inside a word. Searching for w?rd would match “word” and “ward”, but not “weird”.  The * character matches any number of letters (including zero) inside a word. Searching for w*rd matches “wrd”, “word”, “ward”, “weird”, and so on.  The ? and * characters can be very useful if you are searching for names which are likley to have spelling variants, for example MacDonald and McDonald, or Holdsworth and Houldsworth.

If you tick one or more categories without entering any keywords, your result will list all the entries in the category or categories that you tick. When you tick a category, all its sub-categories will become visible, so you can refine your choice of which sub-categories to include in the search.  A category’s sub-categories will remain visible as long as at least one sub-category (or sub-sub-category) is ticked.

If you select one or more centuries in addition to your search words and category selections, the search results will be further limited to entries which have been tagged with at least one of the centuries that you select.  Be aware that putting century tags on Archive entries is work in progress, and if you tick a century tag your search will exclude entries that have not yet been tagged with centuries.

The search will be applied to all Archive entries, the DHRG books that can be viewed online, and DHRG news items, including attachments such as PDF files, Word documents and spreadsheets.  However bear in mind that attached images are not searchable. If you download a Word document or spreadsheet, you can use the find function in Word or Excel to help you find the instance that you are looking for. For example, if you are seaching a census spreadsheet looking for a person named Smith, it would be a good idea to first select the surname column befire using find, so only that column will be searched – this would prevent instances of (say) the word blacksmith in another column cluttering up your results.