How to Use Steve Morse’s One-Step Search form

for the

Indexed Concordance of Personal Names and Town Names

extracted from Kremenets District Documents

 

The Indexed Concordance of Personal Names and Town Names has more than 375,000 entries extracted from various documents and other resources relating to Jews of Kremenets District towns. The Concordance is an Index. Each entry consists of six columns: Surname (derived from Hebrew/Yiddish entries and Russian/Polish entries), Given Name, Town associated with the entry, Source Document, and the Location in the Source where the name can be found. Since each name may be spelled in many ways, locating a particular name and all its spelling variations can be difficult. To ease this problem, we have applied Steve Morse’s One-Step search application to our database. This enables you to do a variety of searches:

 

·       “is exactly” for entries that are spelled exactly as you input them

·       “sounds like” for entries that sound like the name you have input … using the Beider-Morse Soundex system

·       “contains” for entries that contain the name you have input … especially useful for compound or double names

 

You can search any of the 6 columns in the database either singly or in combination. All columns except Town Name use the three search options. The “town name” search allows you to select a town from a pop-up list.

 

In place of full (and lengthy) source descriptions in the database, entries in the Source and Location in Source columns use abbreviations.  Each Source entry links to an explanation of the abbreviation that is in our document, “Introduction and Guide to the Indexed Concordance …”. Click on a Source entry and a page in that document will appear. This page explains how to interpret the Source and Location in Source abbreviation that you selected.

 

The “Introduction and Guide” document fully explains the contents of the database and, in most cases, tells you how to obtain the original document and/or a translation of it. Another useful document on our website is, “How to use the Indexed Concordance.” You can download both documents from our Kremenets District Research Group Kehilalinks website:

http://www.kehilainks.jewishgen.org/Kremenets/web-pages/master-surnames.html

It will be well worth your time to read these documents.

 

Here are a couple of tips for using the search form. Besides the obvious options that you see on the screen, you can display the entire Concordance by leaving all fields blank. Notice that there is an option on the search form for number of hits per page. Although you can type any number into the form, if you type in 9,500 or more, the system will give you an incomplete first page and will not offer an option to go onto the next page. Requesting 9,000 hits per page or less works fine. If you encounter a problem, reduce the number of “hits per page” that you request.

 

To learn more about Morse’s One-Step Search applications, point your web browser to:

http://www.stevemorse.org/onestep/onestep.htm

 

Adam Bronstein, a member of our Group developed the Concordance search application for us. We are deeply indebted to him for lending his time and skill to this effort. And, of course, we are most grateful to Steve Morse for developing the search tool, for making it freely available and for patiently providing assistance in implementing it.

 

Ronald D. Doctor

Co-Coordinator, Kremenets Shtetl CO-OP/Jewish Records Indexing-Poland

an activity of the Kremenets District Research Group

Portland, Oregon

rddpdx@gmail.com

31 August 2009