Advice on searching multiple tables..

Looking for a good way to do this.. I can think of an ugly way, but it doesn't seem too efficient. I am getting one value from a form and I need to search multiple tables to see if this field matches.. the tricky part is I need to basically search all the columns in all the tables for this value, and the column names obviously aren't the same, and some tables have 5 columns, some have 15. The ugly way I can think of is just one damn long mysql query, but that seems like it would be REALLY slow. The other way I can think of is doing X # of searches, where X is the number of tables.. so if I had 5, do 5 different searches. Any better ideas? Thanks, Chad