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Searching the Sawmill Database Online
To search the Sawmill Database Online, navigate to http://treetexas.com/sawmilldb/. You will be presented with a search page where you can enter one or more search words, specify a county, and specify a range of years to search.
Search Words: When one or more search words are specified, the search engine looks for an occurence of each search word in certain key fields in the database (Corporate Name, Local Name, City/Town, Historical Development, etc.). All entries in the specified date range and county (if any) will be included in the search. All entries which match at least one search word are included in the results. The search engine assigns a rank to each result based on a complex formula designed to find the "best" match (eg. results which contain two search words are normally ranked higher than those that contain only one search word). Results are returned in this order ("best" match first). If no search words are specified, then results will be selected based only on the specified date range and county (if any) and will be alphabetized by Corporate Name.
County: By selecting a county, the user can restrict the search to entries for that county, HOWEVER some entries may contain multiple counties in the "county" field -- possibly because a mill was moved during its history or because the exact county is unknown. Entries with multiple counties listed will be searched when any of the listed counties is specified. The entries are simply filtered to include only those that contain a text string matching the name of the county specified. This has the unfortunate side effect that specifying one county may return results from a second county when the name of the first county is contained within the name of the second county (eg. specifying "Harris" county could return some results from "Harrison" county). If "all counties" is specified then results will be selected based only on search words and date range.
Date range: a date range in years is required by the search engine. Only entries which have a verified date range which overlaps the specified date range will be searched. Note that only verified dates are entered in the database, so the actual time span for a mill may be greater than the span of years recorded (if the exact starting and/or ending date is unknown); therefore you may want to extend the date range of your search to find all mills known to have been operating near the year/s of interest. By default, the date range is populated with values that include all entries in the database.
Note that if a search is run using all the default values (no search words, all counties, maximum date range), all entries in the database will be returned.
A maximum of 100 results will be listed for any search. If more than 100 entries are matched, a message appears encouraging the user to refine the search further.
The search page also contains links to pages which list all the entries of the database either by Corporate Name, or by County.
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