General Information
Many of you may be familiar with an "Every Name" index that is often associated with bibliographic documents ... simply put, this provides the reader with a list of ALL PERSONS listed in the document and is very valuable to the researcher. Others may be familiar with the traditional Internet search features.  Though comprehensive, they may only look for certain Key Words in the title of a document and therefore miss other names buried within the document. The County History Preservation Society site utilizes a simple, but powerful, search feature that looks at EVERY WORD of a selected document. This obviously provides the benefit of the aforementioned "every name" index with one great improvement ... you can look for ANYTHING!!!! With this feature, you can search for Civil War regiments, cities, organizations, facilities, etc., the list going on as far as your imagination can take you.
Each of the 92 Indiana counties listed on this site has an individual search for that county that will cull information from all the related documents that you see posted in the menu ... the amount of information on a particular county may be great or small depending on how it has fallen in the line of information additions. Because so many of the individuals making their early home in Indiana often tried multiple counties before settling down, or because their children married and moved to where available land was in other counties, this site also has a "search multiple counties" feature. With this feauture, you may check the selected document groups for the entire Indiana collection, thus broadening your ability to locate ancestors or other information tremendously.
For those of you not familiar with the format of the late 1800s and early 1900s biographical documents, you should note that quite often these individual biographies list the wife of the primary indexed individual along with her maiden name and family history. Additionally, information about the marriages of the daughters is often included ... the point is ... unless you knew the maiden name of a long passed ancestor, you wouldn't recognize her sisters, parents or even previous spouses though she might be discussed in depth ... in many cases, a full search of this nature may very well help cut through the veil of time and connect you to another branch of your family.
As you have perhaps noticed, the individual biographies have been presented on this site utilizing the traditional index that accompanied their original publication ... these biographies have been edited and are freely available to the general public, however, to assist in maintaining and growing this site, the search feature is available only to society Members who, in turn, are Registered for access. Additionally, in many of the aforementioned biographies, small portraits are available to the general public, however, Members can "click" on them and as Registered User have access to the larger images ... the same is true for the majority of the images throughout.
How does it work???
Click on the "Search This County" or "Indiana Biographies - " text in the menu bar. Generally, a dialog box will open asking for your User and Password  ... after you enter this information, make the appropriate selection from the list of search choices and a dialog box (as shown left) will appear.

Enter your desired word (or words) to search in the Text to Search For box.

Select the desired Case ... Insensitive means that you don't want to check for capitalization, Sensitive means you do! This allows you to be more selective, for example ... using "Insensitive" you are able to find the name VanAtta as well as Vanatta ... using "Sensitive" your are able to find only the word Regiment and not regiment.

Select the desired Boolean state ... AND means that you want only documents that contain ALL words listed in the "Text to Search For" box, OR means the document need only contain ONE of the words listed in the "Text to Search For" box. For example ... using AND you can locate documents that contain both Robert and  VanAtta ... using OR you can locate documents that contain Vanderburgh or  Vanderburgh.

Finally ... click on the Search! button. Depending on the request, amount of information to search, as well as your connection, it may take a little time for your results to be displayed.
Common Questions
Q. Why don't any choices appear when I search?
A. Perhaps the word(s) you chose are not yet included in any document. To make sure the Search Feature is functioning correctly enter the word TEST in the "Text to Search For" box with  the selection Insensitive as well and AND then perform a search ... if this doesn't produce results e-mail us immediately so we can fix whatever is wrong with the system. If you did get results using "test" for your choice, try the "multiple county search" selection to look over a wider area.
Q. Why aren't the words I searched for listed in the results but lots of others are?
A. Remember this is an EVERY WORD Search ... the results show only the title of the page and not the contents. You'll need to open the document and use the features of your browser to search the text or, if you're not familiar with how that works, just read the document.
Q. When I read through the document why don't I find the word I searched for?
A. This is where the Case and Boolean choices become helpful ... take for example the word TEST. If my "Text to Search For" was the word "test," documents that have any form of this word will appear, such as testate ... adding additional words and using the AND feature, you could look for both "test" AND "marion" to eliminate many choices.