Searching
The home page has two different search boxes. They look similar but search different things — knowing which is which is the key to finding what you want.
Two search boxes, two jobs
| Search the family graph (top, in the hero) | Searches the claims themselves — people, places, events, relationships. Results are individual statements like ex:caroline-rose-davis · bornAt · Mount Molloy, each with the context it lives in and a relevance score. |
| Search the resources (further down, “The sources”) | Searches the full text inside the stored source documents. Results are the matching snippet (with your terms highlighted) and a link to the resource the fact is anchored to. |
Searching the family graph
Type a name, place, or event and press Search. The example chips (“Caroline Rose Davis”, “Yarrabah”, “Kuku Yalanji”…) run a search when clicked — a good way to see the shape of results. Each result row shows:
subject | the entity the claim is about (often an ex: identifier) |
predicate | the relation — bornAt, marriedTo, mother, recognisedBy, … |
object | the value or the other entity |
context | which body of work the claim belongs to (its provenance) |
score | text-relevance rank for your query |
To go deeper on a result, open the matching person from the Peoplepage — the person view (covered in People & person pages) collects every claim, relationship, and contradiction in one place.
Searching the resources
The resource search runs full-text search over the source documents and returns the passage that matched, with your terms highlighted. Each result notes the document it came from and, where stored, the underlying resource. Click through to Sources to read the whole document.
When a name returns nothing
A blank result is rarely a dead end — old records spell names a dozen ways and a rare surname may sit inside a sentence about someone else. Tactics that work:
Try variant spellings
Names drift across records: Lablanche ↔ Lablache, Collinson ↔ Colinson ↔ Collison, Mahamoodally ↔ Mamode Ally. Search a couple of spellings.
First name + place
When a surname is too common or too rare, search a given name together with a town or mission — Caroline Mount Molloy, Kitty Yarrabah.
Follow the network (FAN)
People appear in each other’s records as witnesses, parents, and neighbours. If a person is hard to find, search someone connectedto them — a spouse, a sibling, the family they worked for — then walk the kin links from that person’s page.