AALT Lists and Indexes: Search help

The Anglo-American Legal Tradition website currently provides about 11 million photographs of historical records, made available by Robert Palmer, Elspeth Rosbrook and Susanne Brand. There are also many lists and indexes containing information extracted from these photographs on the same website.

The AALT database incorporates about 950 of these, containing nearly 250,000 entries. It is searchable by up to three keywords within a single entry and by date. Each search result gives a summary of the information in the entry and a link to the list or index in which it appears.

The keywords indexed are essentially all the words consisting of alphabetical characters in which the first letter is upper-case. They should therefore include surnames, place-names, forenames and the names of counties. The search will return entries in which all of the specified keywords are included.

Note that all the fields for keywords accept single words only.

For all names, the use of either wildcards or soundex is recommended to allow for variations in spelling. Soundex tends to produce a longer list of results to be checked, but may pick up unexpected spelling variants.

Counties. The names of counties should be included in the keywords indexed, but please bear in mind that in the different indexes they are abbreviated in various ways, including three-letter county codes.

Dates. In compiling the database, no attempt has been made to assign dates to individual entries. Instead, for each list or index a range of dates has been assigned, except in two cases, in which either no dates are given or many entries are undated. Searching by date is therefore based only on the range of dates for the list or index, not on the dates of individual entries. As a result, searches may return individual entries falling outside the range of dates specified. For the two undated lists and indexes, entries will be returned regardless of the range of dates specified.