Personnel records and names

From the commissioning of the Boston, navy clerks typed the records of each enlisted sailor coming on or off the Boston. These records were kept in triplicate sending typed reports back to the navy from the ship on personnel logs. Somewhere toward the end of World War II, the Navy computerized presumably IBM punched cards. So, by the end of the war, we had records like this:

For me the challenge with the computerized records was all case was uppercase only. So when I first created the records, I created the last name in lower case (i.e. Kelly), when I recorded the computerized names, I recorded the last name in upper case only (i.e. KELLY), this led to a mishmash of upper and lower case sailor names. In looking at that today I wanted to make a consistent look and feel.

In rectifying names, I ran into a modern name problem, in the universe of computerized names, most last names from the 1940's have dropped a space in the name. Mac Namara is now MacNamara; Van Eaton is now VanEaton, etc. So I normalized the last name for the most part dropping the space and carefully handling the O'Briens of the world. The only space exception I made were the two 'saints', Francis St. Cyr and Henry St. Laurent.

Note: The numbers posted next to the names are Navy ID's and not Social Security numbers. In the Navy sailors were primarily identified by their Navy ID.