Info for the overly curious!

1-2-2012

All,

You’ll find a new tab in the front page of the Blog labelled ‘Info’.  This is texual data about the USS Boston.  So far I’ve placed the first 4 months of Deck Logs in the tab marked info.  Deck Logs are an interesting read, complete with unavoidable puns like ‘Hit the Deck (log)’ or ‘Deck the Log with balls of Folly’;  but I digress.  Decklogs were monthly records that have 4 parts, a title page (missing or stolen from the first 4-5 decklogs), next comes a list of the addresses and names of the next of kin of each of the officers, then each day comes a page called ‘columns’ which list critical data about the weather of the day, the ship’s position at noon, and a list of water and fuel on hand, finally after columns, comes administrative notes for each day which account for what happened in detail on that day.  Disciplinary hearings, people leaving and arriving on the ship, and during the war, how the ship was navigated every 4 hours.

I’ve put July 1943 through November 1943 and I’ll be adding decklogs as I finish assembling them.  I photographed all of the decklogs in Washington DC and I’ll try to assemble them as they should be assembled, not as I found them.  Many people are uninterested in Columns, for many months, the columns have been sorted as a group and placed in the end of the folder, I’m trying to assemble the deck log as it would appear when created.

The cover pages of the first several months are missing, and the Officers next of kin pages are missing form the first two decklogs.  Either they were removed at Nara by people who wanted a keepsake, or they never made it to Nara.  This is why NARA is so crazy about protecting documents. 🙂

Each month is a file (PDF) which is 33-50 Megabytes.  Translation: it’s really large!  make sure you have a fast internet connection to look at it!  My plan is to update individual personnel records with links to individual decklog pages.

Enjoy and let me know if you have any questions!

-Bill