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

An angel remembered

Jack Wilkinson's active service with the 15th Battalion in 1919 lasted just six months, but it created a connection that would endure for the rest of his life.

After the war, many returned men resolved to preserve the bonds forged in battle through clubs or associations. The troops of the 15th Battalion had used "Angels" as a code word in the trenches and so named their group the Angels Remembrance Club . Jack was an enthusiastic member and frequent office bearer over the next quarter century.

The Angels Remembrance Club was noteworthy not only for its work in supporting those who came home but also for the vigour with which they fought to protect the memory of those who did not. When the observance of Armistice Day waned in the late 1930s, it was the Angels (with Jack as Secretary) who strove to maintain its importance in the public eye. They were vocal critics of any plans for military reorganisation that might lessen the perceived stature of the 15th.

Many ex-service organisations held annual dinners during Exhibition Week when members who had returned to their homes in the bush might be in town. But the most significant gathering of old soldiers was always for Anzac Day.

Jack Wilkinson died on 24 April 1944 and some might say that he missed Anzac Day. Few who did attend the march would have noticed that the men of the 15th Battalion gave a second salute that day; and fewer still would have recognised its significance. In its report of the Parade on the following morning, The Courier Mail showed that some connections can never be broken.

Serving the Empire

When he disembarked from the Regina in Quebec, our great grandfather apparently travelled to Mimico, Ontario to meet his uncle. What else can we learn about T J McALLISTER?

The information that he may have served in the first World War was an important starting point. Library and Archives Canada provides a search engine for details of soldiers of the CEF in that war. It showed 146 men with the surname McAllister served Canada.

Seven were called Thomas McAllister; but only two are indexed as having the names Thomas James. When their attestation papers are examined, one of those two (born in Belfast in 1888) does not use the second James in any of the six places his name is written in full.

That leaves just one Thomas James McALLISTER born July 7, 1879 in Cookstown, Co Tyrone (not Corkstown as previously suggested).

Could this be the brother of our 2xgreat grandfather?

A soldier's Will

Until yesterday, all that I knew about Robert BURTON (the eldest brother of our great grandmother Christina) was contained in my post Not just ANZACs describing his death at Suvla Bay.

Now I have on my screen an image of his informal will made on a page of his official notebook left blank for that purpose. In truth it tells me nothing more than I already knew, but it is written in his own hand and carries his signature.

The National Archives of Ireland has made available for searching 9,000 wills of enlisted and non-commissioned soldiers from the thirty-two counties of Ireland who fought in the British Army in the World War I and in the South African war of 1899-1902. There were more than 35,000 Irish deaths in that period, so there will be many disappointed searchers.

Who does the research matters

This post is prompted by a detailed examination of the Royal Australian Navy service record of our grandfather Robert Joseph MCALLISTER RAN B3035. But it is not really about his service or even about him. This is about some very uncomfortable questions raised by, and about, the way we do family history.

We have very little personal knowledge of grandfather's war service (1941-46). He did not want to talk about it, and his son was not really interested (at that time). For different reasons, they shared the view that those events happened in another life—so close the door and move on.

Now, with a very different mindset, the next generation struggles to reconstruct a narrative that they did not want to hear when they could have.

What we do have is a digital image of a yellowed index card. On one side it records name, date of birth (a lie), place of birth, next-of-kin (not a lie but disguising a fractured relationship), home port, religion (the customary official fiction), physical description and date of enlistment. If we had such documentary proof concerning someone from the fifth or sixth generation, it would be regarded as pure gold but would its contents be any more accurate.

Is the researcher obliged to preserve the document intact or to annotate this evidence to try to align it with what we regard as the truth? Does it matter if a future descendant interprets the different "address on discharge" to mean that the next-of-kin moved during the war years, rather than the fact that our grandfather would not enter his mother's house?

The reverse of the record card nominally lists in columns: Name of Ship or Depot, Rank or Rating, From, and To. In fact, as the war progressed the structure of the data decays into a jumble of names and dates.

Nevertheless it is possible to piece together the date of transfer from one posting to another and then to use the official RAN history of the ships to determine their location at the time. The resulting chronology can then be laid on a map but does that graphic represent the war experienced by our grandfather?

From the official record; names, places and acronyms that the researcher has no reason to "know" stir long-forgotten memories of fragments of conversation. A more dutiful son might have a rich fund of stories to provide personal context to the bald list of ships, places and dates. A professional researcher might have access to broader official archives giving additional background. This writer finds himself hovering uncomfortably between two stools; wondering whether this might be a more comfortable pastime if the focus was kept on ancestors you had never met.

And that big blank in the middle of the service record? The information that is obscured (or dare one suggest, removed) is consistent with a half-remembered story of secret involvement in a very significant aspect of the war. That tale, or a rumination on why I will not tell that tale, is a task for another day.

Not just ANZACs

Today marks the 97^th anniversary of the death at Suvla Bay of Lance Corporal Robert Burton of the 5^th Battalion Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers.

Robert was the older brother of our great grandmother Christina BURTON, born in Lanarkshire Scotland in 1893. The family returned to his father's home of Ulster in the early 1900s.

The Fifth (Service) Battalion of the Fusiliers was formed at Omagh in August 1914 as part of K1 (Kitchener's First Army of volunteers created to replace the professional army that had begun the War). The 5^th and 6^th Inniskillings made up part of the 10^th Division, the first ever all-Irish Division, that moved to Dublin then by early 1915 was at Kildare. In April the Division moved to Basingstoke in England before leaving for the front.

The Inniskillings (known as the Skins) landed at Suvla Bay, Gallipoli, on 7 August 1915. They were in the second wave of an attack that began the night before to support a planned breakout from the Anzac sector, five miles (8 km) to the south.

Like most plans at Gallipoli, it foundered and the troops were trapped on yet another beach.

On 15 August, British units advanced against the Turks dug in on Kiretch Tepe Ridge. Little progress was made and the attackers suffered more than 2,000 casualties.

That same day, the British commander at Suvla, Lieutenant-General Sir Frederick Stopford was dismissed. The change came too late to save Robert BURTON. His last resting place is unknown but he is remembered on the Hellas Memorial that sits on the end of the Gallipoli Peninsula.