WW1 Medal list to be destroyed

[Lloydy]

I agree with you Nick. 

I would certainly like to buy my GUncle's medal card - what a wonderful piece of history.

Jan

[Welsh Jen]

I have too, especially as my Grandfather's Medal Card will be amonst them! I am in the predicament that if I knew what the back of the card said I could clarify 100% that the card I have is indeed of my Grandfather's military history. If this is destroyed I may never know.


Very angry 

[craggus]

Am I been stupid?? Does it now not appear that the cards were put on-line precisely so that the originals COULD be destroyed and money saved? If the cost of the scanning/uploading operation is cancelled out by the monies saved by having the cards destroyed then why can't these cards be available to view on-line for FREE at the very least?

Of course, that doesn't detract from the issue in hand... it would be CRIMINAL to destroy these cards.

Craig 

[joboy]

No you are certainly not stupid.
If,as explained by Paul Sturm of the Public Services Development Unit, that the
The National Archives now makes that index available to the public in microfiche here at Kew and also via our website online http://www.documentsonline.nationalarchives.gov.uk/
then that's OK by me .............. BUT it further says;
The reverse side of the index cards has not been copied as the vast majority of them are blank. A very small percentage has something written on the reverse, and in some, but not in all cases, this was the address to which the medals were sent. Sampling has found soldiers' addresses on less than two cards in three hundred and the resources required to identify and extract that small percentage of cards from within the total collection (5-6 million cards) cannot be justified. Notwithstanding the incompleteness of the First World War soldiers' records due to World War 2 bombing, in many cases that same home address will be found within the man's service or pension documents preserved at The National Archives, or indeed on the Commonwealth War Graves Commission's website http://www.cwgc.org

As you would be aware our (collective) particular pursuit is 'family history' and we all search and search for any scrap of detail ........... some precious detail would be on the reverse side of those cards and it would be too 'cavalier' for them to be destroyed without all the detail being recorded.
joboy

[craggus]

Based on 6 million cards: 2 in every 300 = 40,000 addresses on the reverse of the cards which would be lost forever once the cards are destroyed! 

[trystan]

Right, so has anybody got a warehouse that we could store these cards in, and volunteers to look at the backs of the cards?

Seriously, if we want something doing, let's propose it.

[trystan]

Ok, let's say we have six million cards to get through.

That's 6,000,000 

We split them up and divide them between 100 volunteers

Each volunteer has 60,000 cards

Each volunteer flicks through the cards at a rate of say 1 every second.

Let's say the volunteer can work for an hour at that rate, and have a break for ten minutes. Let's say they start at nine o'clock, have just half an hour off for lunch, and they finish at 5 o'clock. That's six hours solid work.

Ok, so that would be 3,600 cards looked at per day.

So it would take 17 days to get through.

Lets add some weekends to that, it would take over three weeks to achieve.

So now the volunteers each have 400 cards with notes on the back. Let's say spend an hour transcribing each card that has been singled out, and scanning each one, and uploading the information to a webpage. That would be thirteen weeks to transcribe them.

So that would take in total sixteen weeks of working full days for one hundered volunteers. Adding a bit of slack to that, it's six months for people working non-stop.

It's a big task.

I've probably got my maths wrong somewhere, but it's late. 

[SS from The Rhondda]

Some more figures:

The 'closed' filing cabinets will require 30 sq m of floorspace to be stored - and that is packed like sardines.

600mm x 350mm x 143
=30.03 m2
allow for opening drawers & walking in-between
=90m2

Transportation:
175kg * 143 = 25,025 kg
= 36 vanloads (@ 700kg/4 cabinets per van)

[joboy]

Agreed the job would be gargantuan .......... BUT have we not heard of 'filtering'. Those lists would not all refer to British personnel ........... there would be Kiwis, Canucks, Indians,Irish, Gurkhas and many many more.
I dont subscribe to any single body combing over the reverse sides of those lists at all (TOO BIG) but I bet that a lot of worldwide organizations like the Returned Soldiers League here in OZ and the British Legion etc would be glad of finding a method.
The lists could be broken down easily into the country that the personnel fought for then into particular services (navy,army,airforce) and then into particular regiments or divisions (navy) etc. and then even down to individual units like ships or where the various military bases were.
You would probably find ,if the birthplace of the server is included in the detail, that the RSL or BL in that particular area would be pleased to involve themselves with the filtering task.
I for one am going to alert the RSL here in OZ as to what is happening and suggest that anyone subscribing to this thread do likewise in their own domain.
joboy