African American Biographical Database: Search Profiles

The Profile Search helps you to locate basic biographical information about an individual and to be directed to the full-text biographical sketches for the subject of your search. All subjects of full-text biographical sketches appear in Profiles. Each field in a Profile is indexed to help you locate the subject of biographies in the database.

Use a Profile Search when you:

• are searching for a specific person. Using the Name field, enter the name last name first (i.e., Brown, Morris). If you know the name of a person's spouse or a nickname, you can search for these using the field also.
• are searching for a specific person, but are unsure of the name. You limit your search using other fields. For example, you may know the subject was born in Charleston, SC around 1810 and became a journalist. By entering that information in the State/Country, City/County, Date of Birth, and Occupation fields, you can browse a small set of results.
• are searching for specific groups of people. For example:
  • Political figures (Occupation) born in Kentucky (State/Country)
  • All Females (Gender) covered in Who's Who in Colored America (Source)
  • Baptist (Religion) Religious Workers (Occupation)
  • Educators (Occupation), born in Annapolis (City/County), who lived during the turn of the century (Date of Birth, Date of Death)

How do I get there?

You can access the Profile Search page by clicking the Profile Search link on the Search Options Page, accessible from the Search icon on the Home Page.

If you are currently using Full Text Search, you can move to Profile Search by clicking the Search Profiles icon on the Toolbar.

If you have already executed a Profile Search, you can return to the Search page by clicking the Refine Search icon on the Toolbar. Your original search terms will be preserved in the Search form.

Where can I go from there?

From the Profile Search page, you can use the Toolbar to open the Search Tips page, consult general information about the database, clear the Search form, move to the Full Text Search or return to the Home Page.

What can I do there?

Profile Search allows you to search across the collected Profiles, containing indexed biographical information. You can perform a Profile Search using a combination of the following search fields:

Name
State/Country
City/County
Occupation
Religion
Source
Date of Birth
Date of Death
Gender

To conduct a search, either type the required search terms (individual words or phrases) into the relevant search boxes or select them from a browse index. A customize search results option enables you to specify the way in which results are retrieved.

In the Search page, you can combine search terms using Boolean and proximity searching and search for variations on search terms using truncation.

Note: Between search boxes, all terms are treated as if they were combined using the Boolean operator AND.

When you have finished making your selections, click Search. The Summary of Matches page will appear displaying the results of your search.