Refining search to Family name

[PeterM3]

How do I refine the search facility to search for my family name? My Name is 'Merchant' and when I search for that I find a very large number of 'Merchant seaman' and other similar occupations and comments. I am sure that this happens to other names too.

Thanks,

[CaroleW]

Which website are you using to search?

[Ruskie]

Are you talking about a google search? You could add a first name and put them both in inverted commas.

Are you looking for mentions of your surname in reference to family history research? If so, you could search by just the surname on any of the sites used for family history research - free sites such as freebmd and familysearch, and the subscription sites such as Ancestry and Find My Past.

[Ruskie]

Just for interest, you could enter it here:

http://gbnames.publicprofiler.org/Surnames.aspx

What exactly are you trying to find out by searching your surname?

[Christine53]

Do you perhaps mean that you are trying to search for topics on RootsChat relevant to your surname ? I don't know how you filter out all the occupational based results.

[CarolA3]

If you're referring to the RootsChat search facility, I have the same problem with some of my surnames e.g. Prior - as in 'prior to 1900' etc

I'm not very clued-up about IT issues, but as I understand it the search facility here can find any group of letters (word or phrase) within all the millions of posts but cannot determine whether what it finds is a person's name, a place name, a verb, a song lyric, or whatever.

In short, it's up to you and me to sift out any relevant results the old-fashioned way

[Lostris]

How about seeing who else is researching the name - on the 'Surname Interests' part of the site /

http://surname.rootschat.com/

[CarolA3]

Looks like Peter's already done that

Carol

[PeterM3]

Thanks everyone. I guess I should have been a bit more specific. I meant for refining the surname search within Rootschat.

You have answered my  question anyway, and I have tried all of your other suggestions. I have long ago found that searching for Peter Merchant in Google finds lots of them, including a number of other university lecturers!

Thank you all,
PM