Name: Can be a part of a name or the exact name. If multiple terms are entered they are automatically combined with AND.
Example: The entry Washington George searches for all entries containing the terms Washington AND George, eg "Abbott, George Washington", "Read, George Washington", "Washington, George" etc.
By using quotation marks you can carry out a phrase search. This means that the result has to correspond exactly to the phrase entered into the search field.
Example: Searching for the phrase "Washington, George" in the search field Name finds all biographical entries on "Washington, George", "Washington, George Corbin" etc, but not entries on "Abbott, George Washington", "Read, George Washington" etc.
Gender: Search for Male, Female, Family, Group (eg the ethnic group of the Zulus) and cross-references.
Year All: In this search field the content of the fields Year of Birth, Year of Death, and Year Cited can be searched together.
Year of Birth: The Year of Birth is given in the way it appears in the content of the original source(s). In the document view it can be seen that more than one year of birth can be available for a person.
Year of Death: The Year of Death is given in the way it appears in the content of the original source(s). In the document view it can be seen that more than one year of death can be available for a person.
Year Cited: The field Year Cited is used to allocate a time period to a biographical entry. The Year Cited is usually given in a biographical entry when the original sources document a person's life in a time period instead of specific dates for year of birth or year of death. In other cases the Year Cited often specifies the live span of a person when the original sources only reveal the birth year or death year but not both.
Temporal descriptions in the sources and their conversion to years:
- 17th century = 1601
- Beginning of the 17th century = 1601
- Mid 17th century = 1651
- End of the 17th century = 1699
- 3rd century BC = -299
- Mid 3rd century BC = -249
- End of the 3rd century BC = -201
- For periods over 40 years the year in the middle was also indexed: For the period 1830-1880 not only 1830 and 1888, but also 1855. For the period 11th - 14th century not only 1001, and 1301, but also 1251.
Occupation: Occupation or social status as given in the sourced reference works. The occupation is given in the language that was defined for the respective Biographical Archive. Usually this is the language in which the original name of the Biographical Archive is given (eg Archive Biographique Françaises = French, American Biographical Archive = English, Archivo Biográfico de España, Portugal e Iberoamérica = Spanish and Portuguese, Russisches Biographisches Archiv = German).
Occupation classification: Standardized occupation information on all biographical entries. See Occupation Classification for more information.
Country: Country names provide access to the geographic regions where persons lived, worked, were born or on which they had a certain influence. This search field is only available for the following five Archives:
- African Biographical Archive (AfBA)
- Archivo Biográfico de España, Portugal e Iberoamérica (ABEPI)
- Australasian Biographical Archive (ANZO-BA)
- Scandinavian Biographical Archive (SBA)
- South-East Asian Biographical Archive (SEABA)
Archive: Search field to limit your search to one or more Biographical Archives. You can search either for the full name or the abbreviation of the archive name, eg ABA for American Biographical Archive or DBA for Deutsches Biographisches Archiv.
Source: Short titles of source works used to compile a biographical entry. Note that short titles that consist of several words must be enclosed in quotation marks.
Saur Document Number: Identification number from the World Biographical Index (WBI), e.g. I001-255-3.
Previous Searches: By means of an individual identifier of each performed search (BIO1, BIO2, etc) it is possible to reuse searches. Previous searches from the biographical search can be combined with this search field. Please note that you have to enter the search identifier in capital letters. To combine several previous searches you have to enter the identifiers in separate entry fields and use the operators at the front of the row to combine the fields.