SEARCHING THE TEXT OF THE COMBINED NEWSLETTERS

I have created single, pure text, files that contain the content of ALL the newsletters in one file. You can search within that text to find ANY text reference that appears within ANY newsletter. Read the discussion below, and then select from one of the following formats:

First, be aware of the nature of what you get by clicking on these Boxes. And if you have a slow internet, take note of the file size:

HTM can be viewed from your browser. HTM is probably the better choice, if you can manage the large file size.

HTM is big, but powerful in that it tells you the EXACT issue and page where it found your search string. It tells you how many references it found (e.g., if you search for "Edward" it will tell you that is found that name more than 1000 times in the newsletters, and will flag each reference. However searching "Coffey County" only appears 7 times. And "Coffee County" shows up with 8 DIFFERENT references.)

XLSX is a Microsoft Excel file, and it will download to your computer. You will need Microsoft Office to run. The Excel spreadsheet is by far the most powerful, giving you the same information as HTM in a smaller package.

The Excel workbook also contains the Index as a separate sheet, and it may be convenient to use Excel's search options on that index.

In all of these, you can search for any text string reference you want, by using "Ctrl+F" (Windows) or "Command+F" (Macintosh).

The search will start with the newest newsletter, so you will discover the most recent references first.

Be aware that the text you see will be fairly accurate for the most recent 40-50 newsletters. However graphics and format have been eliminated.

Most the the oldest 100 newsletters, however, were originally "captured" by scanning a paper copy. I ran OCR (Optical Character Recognition) software on the old copies to capture as best I could the original text. Depending on the original format, this can be problematic. It will sometimes run words together (i.e., no spaces between words), have trouble with adjacent columns, and may break some sentences and words into fragments.

Fancy script may not be recognized, and the OCR software will decide it must be a graphic. For example, some editors liked to show "Coffey" with an extremely ornate "C". So in the text files you will see a lot of "offey cousins" references.

Most often you will want to use these tools just to find WHERE a reference is located, and then call up the original archive newsletter for easier and more accurate reading.

Note that each source contains over 80,000 entry references. HTM and XLSX are the only ones that can accurately tell you which newsletter contains the reference. For the others, you may have to scroll up or down a bit from the located reference, to try to figure out which newsletter was the source.

(With Excel, the search text is in column B, and the adjacent Column A always shows which issue contains the reference.)

MEMO: All four of these formats are actually created in Excel, and if you download that version you are seeing the source.