How do I search Electronic Records Online

You can search the descriptions and content of our growing collection of UK government digital records by entering keyword(s) into the search box and clicking the search button.

Search tips

  1. The most relevant hits with all your words will be shown first. Relevance ranking looks at 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.

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.

 

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