Archival catalogs don’t usually list all names correctly. People have been recorded under a married name, initials, transliterated, or spelled by someone who thought they heard something else. Towns have changed their names, swapped administrative jurisdictions, or were recorded in another language. Dates can also vary depending on a family tradition, a register entry, or a later account. A search term list can be helpful if you want to keep track of potential search terms before doing random searches that are hard to replicate later.
Select one individual, entity, location, or event from your project, and create four quadrants on one page: names, dates, locations, and related terms. Write down the information you already know, and then write down any additional information from your notes or sources. For example, for an individual, you might include the full name, initials, maiden name, alternate transliterations, nicknames, and possible misspellings. For an entity, you might include the full title, acronyms, parent organizations, sub-units, etc. Don’t include every possible permutation—just include those you can find evidence for, and make sure you clearly mark which ones are hypothetical so you don’t mistakenly think you’ve proven them to be true.
Include date ranges when you aren’t sure of the specific year. Searching only in 1912 will miss a document that was actually written in late 1911, copied in 1913, or created under a different administrative time period. Write down the specific date you know, any date ranges you believe are plausible, and the events associated with them. For example, you might note that someone reported being born in a certain year when filling out an application decades later, versus the actual year noted on a register, versus the years the family lived in a specific city. This way, you can change one aspect of your repository search without losing track of why you’re searching for that particular date.
You’ll need to do similar work for locations. Start with the current name of the town or village, then see what other names it has had based on old maps, gazetteers, archival catalogs, or collection descriptions. Include the county, state, district, parish, or other administrative entity that controlled the location during your relevant time period. Repositories typically describe their records in terms of the administration that created them, not the location as you’d recognize it today. So you might have to search for a particular location by looking up records held at the nearest regional office, ecclesiastical district, estate, factory, military regiment, or municipal department.
Once you have your list, use it to control your search. Don’t just type every word you have into a search box at once. Start with one name and one location, and then try changing one variable at a time. Record your search in your research log so you know how many hits you got for each combination of search terms. Try your search again using a broader date range, a different location, or a related name. Make a note of the catalog you used, the words you searched, what you found, and whether there was a collection, series, or file that looked worth investigating. If two searches give you different results, keep searching for both until you can get enough context from a finding aid or some records to determine which one is more likely to be correct. The list will help you keep your searches from turning into a random assortment of words that you’ll never be able to replicate later.