Site Search

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This search engine will provide the location of a search term throughout the North Carolina Postal History Society website. This includes all the text on the website, the North Carolina Postmark catalog, and all issues of the NCPHS Journal from 1982 with the exception of the most recent four issues.
Examples of how to form your search query are shown below:
Asheville Murphy - Returns documents containing both the words Asheville and Murphy
Asheville Murphy OR Franklin - Returns documents containing the word Asheville and either Murphy or Franklin
"Asheville and Murphy" - Returns documents containing the exact phrase "Asheville and Murphy"
Click here for detailed search help...

How to conduct a site search using Google Custom Search

We are using a special program to conduct searches on our web site call Google Custom Search (GCS). This feature will allow you to conduct a word or phrase search across all sections of our web site. The results will appear on a new page that looks like a typical Google search page, but instead of searching the entire globe of web sites, this search is only across all the pages of our web site and the pages of all the PDFs on our web site. Clicking on the word “Search” in the footer bar will take you to the search page with these instructions and allow the same search. The difference is that the icon on the menu bar opens up to initiate the search right there on the page you are on while the footer bar word “Search” will take you to the page titled “Site Search” with these instructions, but you can still do the search.

As an example, let’s take the words “Elizabeth City” and enter them in the space that opens when you click on the search icon in the menu bar. Now hit “enter” on your computer keyboard and Goggle will do its standard search, not on the whole universe but just on the North Carolina Postal History web site. The GCS page opens and shows there are 49 results for the words you typed in. You will see a list with all the places where “Elizabeth City” was found on our web site. The couple of lines under each listing will give you an idea in which document the search words appear. If the line starts with “NCPHS Journal Issue….,” it will be in a journal article or, if in the early years, a newsletter. By clicking on that entry line, a PDF of that journal or newsletter will open up. But, it won’t show you where in the journal or newsletter your search words appear. Therefore, you must use the PDF search feature of that journal or newsletter. Selecting Control F on your control board will bring up a white box in the upper right corner. Place the name “Elizabeth City” in it and there will appear, in this example, the first of six places in the document which are highlighted in blue for your search words. Each time you click on the down arrow it will jump to the next place the words are used.

Sometimes the search results will just list a number, such as “83” in this example. By clicking on the number you will find a PDF opens for the society journal with the Whole Number 83. Again use Control F to learn that there are five listing in this selection for your search words, each highlighted in blue.

The GCS may take you to the listing of a “Catalog of North Carolina Postmarks During the Stampless Period.” This will be our input to the coming, new American Stampless Cover Catalog. The PDF search through Control F will list all the Elizabeth City postmarks for that period

Google is still indexing our site and may take a few weeks to correctly find all the locations of a search word(s). In some cases those entries may no longer exist. In other cases, a page will come up that says “Not found, error 404.” GCS was unable to complete the search in that item; so, skip it and try another.

We hope that those of you who are experienced in using Google searches, will find this feature on our web site helpful to you.

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