Comments on: New military records on the way: WO96 & 97

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By: Esther Townes

Esther Townes — Fri, 15 Oct 2010 07:31:18 +0000

I have been wading through the JOHN SMITH entries in WO97 records to try to find my Chelsea Pensioner Great Grandfather, and I have been so disappointed to discover documents wrongly sorted. I found 5 JOHN SMITH of obvious differences in one 30 odd image set. This is devastating as searching for JOHN SMITH is difficult enough anyway, especially as there has been little effort by to establish the date of birth. This is easy to calculate; often it is to be found in the 4th image. Even recording the date of attestation date, and the age at attestation would be a start. Yes, I have reported the Transcription errors, but the quality of this copying is not very good. As a Australian researcher, delighted to have it online, but…………………..

By: iantester

iantester — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 10:08:30 +0000

Hello Matthew: yes, these datasets were a little odd in that we didn’t digitise them from fresh but rather acquired them through a licencing deal with a partner in the format they’re currently in which didn’t allow for backwards engineering to make them more searchable. Where we do fresh digitisations, we have complete control over the imaging and transcriptions and therefore the search fields.

By: Matthew Camp

Matthew Camp — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 19:37:30 +0000

Ian,

Thank for responding.
Hopefully you can emulate your performance on the Census with these new products then.

I’m just concerned this may be overlooked because you haven’t been able to implement ‘regimental’ searching yet for De Ruvigny, Soldiers Died or National Roll- all datasets that really should be searchable by regiment given the information contained in them and the relative ease of transcribing printed text.

Perhaps there was a licencing issue with these products preventing you from doing more than the minimum you have provided to date, but hopefully you won’t have such an issue with WO96/97.

I look forward to seeing the end results in 2011.

By: iantester

iantester — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 09:52:50 +0000

@Matthew: exact details of the search and indexing are still being determined but rest assured that we always transcribe fully and aim to make as many fields searchable as possible - indeed we lead the market on this on our census collection.

Our minimum aim is to improve upon the searchability, accuracy and indexing of WO363/4.

By: Matthew Camp

Matthew Camp — Tue, 17 Feb 2009 17:56:44 +0000

I hope you’ll be making these searchable by regiment and regimental number too, and not just by name. Much of the utility of these records will be lost if you don’t include these key fields.

The prime users of these records at the National Archives are medal collectors, military researchers and regimental historians rather than people searching for their ancestors (although there is obviously significant interest from that area as well). As such, it would be most useful if they were indexed properly.

As was mentioned when these series were put out to bid the “Friends of the National Archives” have been transcribing such files using Soldier’s Name, Place of Birth, Regiment(s), Year of discharge, covered dates of service.

Personally, I would think this should be a minimum requirement, and something like Ancestry’s indexing of the WO363 and WO364 files should be emulated. There they include name, age, birth year, residence location, birth county, regiment, number.

Providing a search based solely on a name just won’t provide much utility for many existing and potential subscribers. I pity the poor researchers who are going to have to look for “John Smith” if all they’ll have is a surname search to wade through.