Category: Naval Records

In my long slog to make sailor records available, I’ve decided to link the records to original sources. This has the effect of double-checking, and ensuring that I ‘get it right’. Since a few months after I started to enter data, I added the source of the original documents, and I’ve recently uploaded over 1000 files of personnel records to the website.

When you look at an individual record, you can now see a link too ‘See Original Document’. This will link you to a picture file which is the source for the underlying record. This is both good news and bad news for the reader and for me 🙂 For the reader, you’ll see some truly bad records, out of focus, etc., for me it means if I get it wrong I hear from you! That’s actually OK! 🙂

Of the nearly 5000 individual records for sailors arriving and departing from the USS Boston that I currently have, only about 25 are ‘missing’. Records go missing for two basic reasons, first I screwed up and entered the wrong date by accident and I need to search through 1400 pictures of records to find the missing record, or more likely, the clerk (actually called a Yeoman :-)) on the ship missed a sailor who arrived, or recorded a sailor who failed to arrive. This makes the records really interesting like a huge puzzle, I get to ask questions like ‘this sailor is on the boat and yet he never arrived!’, or ‘When did this sailor leave? He never left and I have no other record but an arrival record, did he really exist on this boat?’. OK, so I have sort of a twisted definition of fun. 🙂

Please us the contact page if you find a records problem! And yes, I know that this process is not complete and I’m still adding sailors in december 1945. Next up for me is to review the roughly 400 promotions of 1943 and add record numbers so that they also display the original documents. I have about 850 total promotions, and probably about 2000 more to enter.

After I clean up the promotion records I want to clean up the discipline records. Discipline records are difficult, because some information is in the personnel records and more information is in the Deck log. The Deck log I have is in an incompatible picture format which will not convert (I get a completely black document). My plan is to return to NARA in Washington in December and re-potograph the deck log. I should them be able to upload it to the website and link records to it.

Bill

With my laser focus on just adding sailors on and off the boston, I have reached September 1945 when the war ended. Given the gaps on the records and the readable records this will take a while to completely clean up, but I have 2,363 records to date in the database with some form of sailor ID, First Name, Last Name and many with enlistment place and date records. Currently, I need to add 1,466 records of sailors departures after the war was over, we’ve already have 5,713 records of arrivals and departures. I also have about 22 records where a sailor left the ship without arriving, arrived or departed twice in succession (which is obviously an error!), I have about 7 orphan records where I have Sailor information and no add or received records (this happens when I find an error in the navy ID and fix it in the sailor record and forget to fix the on/off records). Given my original records from Frank Studenski’s diary I expect to add an additional 127 sailors who I believe have been missed due to unreadable records.

One interesting data point which I’d like to analyze further is the number of sailors who went to the hospital after the ship arrived in San Pedro in May of 1945 looks very high. My plan is to do a separate Hospital analysis.

We’ve recorded a few deaths, during the records, but I’d like to correlate these with the Deck Log to find out exactly what happened. The few I know about were from natural causes and one was electrocution.

As I said before, Since april-may of 1945 I’ve lost enlistment data for new sailors added in 1945, the data simply wasn’t recorded because it looks like the navy was preparating for computerized records and decided they no longer had to record where each sailor enlist and the enlistment date for every record. I’ll have to fix the display for these sailor records, because it says they enlisted at “,” which looks dumb. I’ve processed 985 pages of records for sailors coming on off the boston, I have 187 pages left to process.

I’ve made a decision that since this blog is about the BOSTON in World War II AND I’m not going to add sailors who joined the boston after the war was actually over. If you disagree with me let me know and we can discuss it, just hit the contact button and let me know.

thanks,
Bill

Last night as I watched fireworks and heard lots of patriotic music and saw fireworks, I thought of my Dad and the many soldiers, sailors and air personnel who have participated in wars for our country. I wondered whether they had mixed reactions to seeing and hearing the BOOM of fireworks, since they witnessed a more deadly kind. My dad talked about being able to nearly grab a Japanese Zero as it flew close to the Signal Deck on the BOSTON where he watched the expert gunners on the BOSTON cut it into pieces.

The Sailor database on this site is progressing! Apologies to the friends of Officers, I will figure out the Officers on the ship after I finish the enlisted men. I have 1,172 microfiche pages of sailor personnel records, as I progressed in this project I decided to start with just the sailor records that involved arriving on board (Received) and departing the ship (Transferred). Once all the arrivals and departures are processed I’ll return to the promotions, discipline, re-enlistments, etc. in the personnel record. When this is complete, I’d like to add deck log records by sailor.

With 1,172 total pages, I’ve just completed page 752. Some pages are tougher than others, some pages are nearly unreadable, but I’m able to get fragments of information and find the sailor. Some information records may be lost if the entry record and the departing records are too poor. One record change that recently happened was in about august of 1944, enlistment dates and citys of enlistment were dropped. This was interesting data and probably about 400 of our sailors may not have this interesting data.

When this project started I had simply LAST NAME, First initials from a copy of Frank Studenski’s diary my brother found. These records were from late in the war and represented about 1800 sailors. I took these records and scanned them, and inputted them into a database. Since then I’ve gone to NARA in Washington DC and I’ve received the official USS Boston sailor records. I’ve now added the Naval ID, full first name, and enlistment data where I have it. I’ve created a linked table which lists every time a sailor arrives and leaves the BOSTON; This table now has 5,066 records of individual sailor arrivals and departures. I’ve created three other tables for change of rank, discipline, and miscellaneous info like re-enlistment, change of name, etc. I’m not really updating these tables until I finish the arrival/departure work.

It’s been about 14 months of on and off work and I’m hoping to finish before computers become obsolete. 🙂

Happy record searching,
Bill