Search the ODFHS online library
As a service to members, we are gradually upgrading our search facility.
Much of the ODFHS archive material is available online here as scanned PDF or image files and, although this faithfully records the original document, it is not amenable to simple text search. So finding reference to your favourite ancestor can be difficult. However, using modern optical character recognition (OCR) software, we are now able to scan images and extract text in a readable form.
Those of you who use online sources such as The British Newspaper Archives will be familiar with the (sometimes idiosyncratic) output from OCR of old documents, especially when the original images are poor quality, so it ain't perfect. But it can save time.
We haven't yet scanned all our archives, but feel free to give it a try. If you would like to do a simple keyword or name search, just click on the link to the search page. This will then give you a list with links to any of our original documents containing your search terms.
Hint: Since the OCR output is often fragmented, try using partial words or phrases to increase the number of potential hits.
Note: For technical reasons, this search algorithm does not allow wildcards.
