Military records on Ancestry

There are some things that are inextricably associated the commemoration of ANZAC Day. In the world of family history, that includes a new wave of advertisements from Ancestry announcing the availability of "new" Australian military records. Those of us familiar with the holdings of the National Archives of Australia and the Australian War Memorial tend to view these claims with a touch of scepticism. There is rarely anything new available to subscribers that we have not been accessing free from the official repositories for some time. But we live in hope.

On April 23 2020, Ancestry revealed their latest offerings ANZAC Memorial 1914-18 and Australia, WWII Second Australian Imperial Forces and Citizen Military Forces Service Records, 1939-1947. Now that the metaphorical dust of battle has settled, it is time to try to assess their value to researchers.

Ancestry describes the first offering in these terms.

This database contains The (sic) Anzac Memorial [1], a book compiled to commemorate those who served in the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps (ANZAC) and died in World War I. The contents of this book are varied. Much of the book is comprised of a Roll of Honour, listing nearly 20,000 Australians who died in the war. 

While records of nearly 20,000 lost certainly sounds impressive, remember that the AWM puts the national total killed in action or died of wounds at more than 60,000. So a search for a randomly chosen person known to have died will have a 30% chance of success. 

The original book was published in 1919 by the Returned Sailors' and Soldiers' Imperial League of Australia, New South Wales Branch and understandably is heavily skewed to men born in, or otherwise associated with, New South Wales. So a search in Ancestry for men of the 19th Battalion (raised in NSW) locates 805 of the 874 names recorded on the AWM Roll of Honour. By contrast, the Queensland-sourced 25th Battalion beside whom the 19th fought their last great battle on Mont St Quentin has just 85 of 1026 men known to have fallen [2] included in the Ancestry collection.

While the search facility may be of limited value, Anzac Memorial on Ancestry does offer digitised images of each page in the printed book. So what do you get? If you are familiar with the Nominal Roll on the AWM site, and imagine removing the details of all men who RTA (Returned to Australia) then you have it - complete with idiosyncratic alphabetisation. Except that less than one-third of the entries are included.

So you really might as well ignore the jingoistic blandishments of Ancestry and simply go straight to the Australian War Memorial for ready access to a full record set. Unless of course you are interested in viewing the digital image of the Official Summary of Peace Times (that is how Ancestry has transcribed the reference to the Terms of the Armistice into its Table of Contents)!

However the second of the newly-released collections (Australia, WWII Second Australian Imperial Forces and Citizen Military Forces Service Records, 1939-1947) sounds more promising. 

Ancestry says 

This collection contains service documents for individuals serving for the AIF (Second Australian Imperial Forces) or CMF (Citizen Military Forces) during WWII.

I opened the dataset through the card catalogue and tossed in a name from our mother's tree, Noyes (spelling exact). It resulted in just one hit [3]. 

Name: Percival Reginald Noyes 
Birth Date: 20 Feb 1916
Birth Place: Brisbane, Queensland, Australia
Enlistment Place: Brisbane
Service Number: Q49493
Service Branch: Citizen Military Force
Relative Name: Elizabeth Noyes

Pretty impressive!

So for comparison,  I went across to NAA and ran a name search for Noyes and sure enough there was the same record [4] 

but this one took a bit of finding because of the 19 other men named Noyes in the same list.

Had I been too restrictive by demanding exact spelling at Ancestry? So run the search again without it and get 5 hits - Percival Noyes, and 4 people called Neuss.

Did Ancestry have access only to a subset of the NAA records? Click on Learn more about this database and you will see that Ancestry has based "their" collection on series B883 and B884 at NAA. Whereas of the 20 men named Noyes located in RecordSearch, 8 come from series B883 and the other 12 from B884. 

It was beginning to look as though it was sheer luck that the one Noyes that Ancestry found was someone that I recognised. Could there be a (lot of) serious transcription errors in their data? So I took a record from the NAA results (B884 NOYES THOMAS GEORGE : Service Number - Q70518 : Date of birth - 23 Jun 1916) [5] and fed it into Ancestry -- Your Search for Thomas George Noyes returned zero good matches.

It should have been obvious that this collection could not provide comprehensive coverage of WWII service from the number of records it claimed, just 14,405. So does this dataset complement the 1.44 million entries in Australia, World War II Military Service Records, 1939-1945 (an ANZAC DAY 2016 offering)? Well there are certainly many more Noyes records in that older collection. But they also include a familiar-looking entry for Percival Reginald Noyes (cited as being drawn from NAA Series B884).

What was offered as new Second AIF and CMF record could have been regarded as a minor update to the existing WWII Military Service Records; but would you want to write that advertisement?

Oh well, there will be another ANZAC Day "special offer" next April.

References

1. The correct title of the book has no definite article. See its catalogue details on Trove https://trove.nla.gov.au/version/22661305
2. Digger History http://www.diggerhistory.info/pages-conflicts-periods/ww1/1aif/2div/07bde/25th_battalion_aif.htm
3. Ancestry.com. Australia, WWII Second Australian Imperial Forces and Citizen Military Forces Service Records, 1939-1947 [database on-line]. Lehi, UT, USA: 2020.
4. NAA: B884, Q49493
5. NAA: B884, Q70518

A battle with the AIF

The prompt for this (third) week of the NFHM Blogging Challenge refers to some of the significant battles of two World Wars that will be remembered during this month. But, not all of the battles that took place in 1916 and have shaped our family histories across generations were military actions. There were personal battles, bureaucratic battles and domestic battles taking place on the Home Front that were to prove equally influential.

On the 19th of August 1915, Recruiting Train 3 returned to Brisbane¹ via the North Coast Line after a final major rally at Gympie intended to attract new recruits for the Expeditionary Force.

In the next few weeks, Queenslanders began to get an inkling of the tragedy occurring in Turkey. On 7 September, the Brisbane Courier carried a small item² referring to heavy Australian losses that hinted at (what we now know as) the disastrous attack on Hill 60 (Kaiajik Aghala) without any explicit reference.

So it was not surprising that by the middle of September 1915 there would be a surge in the number of men presenting themselves at Victoria Barracks eager "to do their bit" One might not have expected to see Alfred Edward Noyes among them. He was no youthful bushman in search of adventure but a 33-year-old former timber-getter tending a small fruit farm at Palmwoods to support his wife Emily and their six surviving children.

Nevertheless, on 18 September 1915, Alfred swore that he would "well and truly serve our Sovereign Lord the King in the Australian Imperial Force from [that day] until the end of the war" and Dr. Cameron of the Army Medical Corp declared him fit do so (although he noted a "large scar on the front of his right leg"). The group of new recruits was assigned to A Company, 7th Depot Battalion at Enoggera for their basic training³.

Alfred's first few months in the Army must have been unexceptional. The only entry on his record concerns a 5/- fine for a bout of drunkenness to celebrate the New Year. The same period was much harder for Emily. As she wrote in a letter to confirm a meeting with an Army Chaplain, "all his interests on the farm are going to rack and ruin [...] the man he left to look after it has cleared out [...] I have five young children that prevents me from doing anything". She apparently felt it would be too much to add that the twins had celebrated their first birthday after Alfred enlisted and that Doreen (apparently not counted among the "young" children) was not yet 11.

On 20 January 1916, the recruits were deemed ready to be assigned to their eventual unit for final training before departure. Alfred was included in the 17th Reinforcements for the famed 9th Battalion with whom he moved to Exhibition Camp at Bowen Hills. Given the need to ensure that the available weapons and ammunition went to the troops at the Front, much of basic training in 1915 was undertaken with broomstick "rifles". At Exhibition Camp, Alfred was issued with a real SMLE service weapon which would reveal a flaw in his readiness for embarkation. Not only was Private Noyes unable to fire the rifle successfully, he could barely handle it. His difficulty was attributed to a "stiff wrist".

Meanwhile Emily was continuing her campaign to have her husband sent home. She wrote that "An examination of his arm and leg should convince anyone that he is not fit for active service". It seems that the interests of an angry wife and a frustrated company commander coincided and, on the 8th of February, a Medical Board was convened to determine whether Alfred should be discharged as medically unfit.

When questioned, he freely acknowledged that a log had fallen on him at Killarney in 1902 crushing his right side. He had since had two operations on his right arm but the wrist was still twisted. The official medical examination identified "atrophy of right forearm ... deformity of wrist ... loss of bone ... adhesions between ulna and radius preventing rotation". The professional opinion of the Board members was that this represented a 50% reduction in the man's capacity for earning a full livelihood in the general labour market.

On 21 February 1916, Alfred Noyes' war ended. He was discharged and caught a train back to Palmwoods to tend his pineapples (and to extend his family when young Edward Alfred was born in the following January).

It seems probable that even after her husband's return, Emily continued to be responsible for most of the heavy work. Eldest daughter Doreen had strong recollections of "looking after the little ones" while her mother undertook farm work that possibly contributed to her early death at just 39 years old in 1927.

It was not just on the Western Front, that there were extended battles from which no real winner would emerge.

References:

1. Queensland State Archives: Police Commissioner's Office; 16865 Correspondence 1861-1987; 2041776, Correspondence about advertising and arrangements for the Recruiting Train (1268M 50); digital image; ; accessed 19 August 2016
2. 1915 'THE DARDANELLES.', The Brisbane Courier (Qld. : 1864 - 1933), 7 September, p. 7. , viewed 21 Aug 2016, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article20068160
3. National Archives of Australia: Australian Military Forces; B2455, First Australian Imperial Force Personnel Dossiers, 1914-1920; 7999844, NOYES ALFRED EDWARD; digital image; ; accessed 19 August 2016

Happy coincidences

I got a real buzz listening to the July episode of the Genies Down Under podcast yesterday.

Apart from all the usual excellent features, my excitement was caused by the fact that Maria included an item that I had submitted from our family history. The theme for the episode was "Coincidence stuff for genies: Tales of genealogy flukes" and I wrote a short piece about the multiple appearances in our history of the ship SS Demosthenes.

At Christmas 1916, Charles COLEY and Reginald NOYES sailed on HMAT A46 Demosthenes from Sydney as reinforcements for the 25th and 26 Battalions respectively. There is no evidence that they ever met, but a decade later, Charles' nephew Alexander Clarence COLEY married Henry's niece Doreen NOYES and they became our great grandparents.

After the end of War War I, the Demosthenes was returned to the Australian Commonwealth Line and resumed service on the England-Australia route. In 1928, grandfather Robert Joseph MCALLISTER (from the other side of the tree) migrated to Australia with his mother and younger brother aboard the very same SS Demosthenes.

However much a family historian may claim that he spends hours poring over old documents and on-line databases for the intellectual challenge of solving real-life puzzles, the boost to the ego of having your work out in public is very nice.

Thanks Maria, for the opportunity to show my children that this "ancestor" is still productive.