Help section

Most of your hits will be catalogue descriptions of historical documents held in The National Archives or in other archives

Most of these documents are the primary sources for research, not fully worked-out information on topics such as Victorian Britain or the Crimean War. If you wanted this kind of material, have a look at our exhibitions.

Search tips

1. The most relevant hits with all your words will be shown first. Relevance ranking looks the number of occurrences of all your words, proximity context and phrase matches.
2. To find exact phrases only, surround your words with double quotation marks, for example "Prince of Orange".
3. You do not have to type AND between words. By default we return hits that contain all your words, but don't use + or - signs.
4. If you want to, you can use AND, NOT, OR, NEAR (Boolean searching).
5. To combine a Boolean search with a phrase, you must use double quotation marks for the phrase. For example "Prince of Orange" AND marriage.
6. To investigate your results by subject, use the links to the left of your main results: choose All Subjects to see the full list of results by subject.
7. For date searching, go to Advanced search.
8. Too many or too few results? Try Advanced search or consult our Research Guides
9. If you know we have some records but cant find them through searching, you may need to browse The National Archives Catalogue

Advanced search tips

1. You can select searches for all words, any words and exact phrase.
2. You can use AND, NOT, OR, NEAR (Boolean searching), but don't use + or - signs.
3. You need to use quotation marks round exact phrases but not round single words.
4. You can narrow your search by:

5. You can use a combination of all of these techniques.
6. Still too many or too few results? Consult our Research Guides
7. If you know we have some records but can’t find them through searching, you may need to browse The National Archives Catalogue

Subject categories

We have assigned thousands of collections (not individual documents) to subject categories. As some collections contain information on many subjects, some documents may appear in an odd category.

Excluded data

Several other resources are not searchable from here, such as the E179 database, the Manorial Documents Register and the Hospital Records Database. You can search for names in the 1851 Census by ticking a box in the Advanced Search.

Alternative search terms

Many catalogue entries use the spelling of surnames or places as given in the original documents. Try using asterisks instead of vowels. J*nk*ns will find Jenkyns, Jenkens, Jeynkyns as well as Jenkins; M*nster will find Munster, Münster and monster.

Forenames are often abbreviated: William may be Wm or Willm, Elizabeth may be Eliz or Elizth. These have been automatically expanded in your list of results, if the abbreviation is next to a surname.

Abbreviations not next to surnames have been left as they are, so you may need to search again using any abbreviations you have picked up. For example:

Wm. and Elizth., the two children of Thos. {Thomas?} Whittington.

Think about nicknames as well – Billy or Betsy (not as likely as abbreviations of the formal name, but still possible).

Next steps

If you want to look at the actual documents, follow these steps:

1. Find out which archive they are held in by clicking through.
2. If it is not The National Archives, please contact the holder of the records, or check out their own website.
3. If it is The National Archives DocumentsOnline, images of these documents can be seen online for a small fee (and free from our Reading Rooms).
4. If it is in The National Archives Catalogue, you need to access the original another way. You can choose to buy a copy, come to see the document, or pay for research.