Monday 10 July 2017

Wolfram alpha

This is a computational site. I'm sure it has lots of uses.

I use it to find the day of a week a certain date was.  e.g. Try typing in your birthdate. It will tell you the day of the week and exactly how old you are with months and days. And lots more.

It comes into its own to pinpoint a date from a newspaper report.

For example I found a newspaper report of a death "last Tuesday". The date of the newspaper is 10 Sep 1864. So to find the date of death simply type in the date

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=10+sep+1864

10th was a Saturday so the previous Tuesday was the 6th September 1864.

QED


Wednesday 5 July 2017

Scotlandspeople - name search

I had not really used this feature until recently.


I think the reason was that it gives far too many results if you type in a common name like Robert Wilson.  Yikes!

You can restrict results by date e.g. from 1850 - 1950

However, if the name is less common or if especially you have a middle name as well, it will give you all matching records at once.

Here are the 3 results for Edna Stewart Sinclair. You can view at each and use the back arrow to return to this screen. Result!