The original Zachariah Dutton Discussion Group was born in June 1998 with fifteen members. The idea was to bring together all of the descendants of Zachariah Dutton who I'd been corresponding with, so that they could share data and compare notes. I figured that a lot of us were talking to each other anyway, so it would save time to have a central forum in which we could reach everyone at once. The list was a wonderful success.
In the beginning, the list was set up as what I called a "manual list". It had no central organization, and required all twenty-something people on the list to maintain the list of recipients themselves. This turned out to be a maintainer's nightmare, as the list grew a lot faster than we expected, and was a lot more active that we could have hoped.
The list continued in this form for a little more than a year. Eventually, we realized how much easier our lives would be if we moved the list to RootsWeb, and used their automated list server. I had no idea how easy it was to create a list there, or I would have done it that way in the first place.
Perhaps the worst and most lasting side effect of the way we were running the list in that first year was that there was no list archive. All messages sent to the list in those early days were lost and inaccessible to anyone who wasn't around back then — until now.
In July 2003, I finally did what I should have done years ago — I created a searchable archive for the first year of the list, which I now dub "the Old List". There is a wealth of information contained in these messages, which I hope will prove useful to you.
Using old e-mail files from five years ago that I only recently discovered, I have reconstructed what I hope to be a mostly complete archive of the Old List. There are at present around three hundred messages in the archive, ranging from June 1998 to August 1999.
The DUTTON-Z Archive Search (or Zarch) supports basic search engine syntax, as well as an advanced search.
The basic search only searches the body of the messages. If you wish to search the subject, use the advanced search.
The advanced search supports three types of searches, which can be used together for maximum precision.
Three text fields are searchable: body text, subject, and sender. The same rules and capabilities listed above apply to searching each text field. Searching the body text by itself accomplishes the same result as using the basic search.
There are three types of date searches supported: within date, after date, before date.
Within date finds messages with dates that are within the given date. You may search within a year, a year and month, or a year, month and day.
After date and before date work in much the same way. A year only, a year and a month, or a year, month, and day may be entered. When used together, after date and before date can find messages that were posted within a range of dates.
The return order field controls what order the search results are sorted in. It presently supports sorting by date (the default), subject (useful for following threads), and sender (useful for finding messages from a certain person).
Here are some examples of using the advanced search options together:
This is my first attempt at writing a database application for the Web. Although I have tested it, there are bound to be some bugs. If you ever get an error message, or if the search doesn't do as you think it should, please e-mail me and let me know.
The search does have some limitations, caused in part by the way I have the database set up. I hope to improve these in the future. Most notably, the search can't distinguish word boundaries — i.e. it can't tell the difference between the words 'Penn' and 'Pennsylvania'.
Without further ado, I give you the DUTTON-Z Archive Search.