New: See Original Document!

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