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The Great War (1914-1918) Forum

Remembered Today:

M.C. and D.C.M.


theodore

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Is it just me or is there a problem with the LG search engine.

I have tried without any success to get the citations for the following men.

8713 George Crump M.C. LG date8.3.15

CQMS 8713 George Crump D.C.M. LG date 1.1.18

Sgt. 10070 F.W. Day D.CM. LG date 1.1.19

Sgt. 8670 E. Edwards LG date 3.10.18

9343 T.V. Churches D.C.M. LG date 5.8.15

RSM 4893 Cyril Charles Tough M.M. LG date 27.7.16

I have a number of names that I have been able to find but the above have proved impossible to date to find, having tried a number of ways to enter details but no luck.

Can anyone help please?

Regards

Peter

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Things are sometimes not as easy to find as they might be because of the way the text has been scanned and converted from an image to (hopefully) readable text. In particular, spaces and line breaks sometimes mean that the last forename and surname get run together, so it's often worth giving e.g. georgeday a go as a search term. Harder to resolve is when the surname gets run together with some of the details of the next man - since you have no way of knowing who that's going to be. As others have said, often the number gives you more success. It can also be worth trying just the forenames or initials, particularly if they are not too common.

Also, remember that most awards appear in supplements, and these are filed under the date of the main gazette issue to which they were a supplement, meaning you need to search over a range of several days starting before the dates you have for the awards. For example, you have two awards which look like they are probably in New Year Honours lists (dated 1 January 1918 and 1919 respectively). You need to start your search from say 27 December to make sure you have some chance of picking these up. It can be better to search on the medal name, and then work your way through the list. another useful thing to search on is the phrase graciously pleased which is always used in the introductory formula, something like "HM the King is graciously pleased to award the Distinguished Conduct Medal to the following non-commissioned officers and men"

Where did you get the award dates from? If the cards in Documents Online, these usually also have a page number on as well. Page numbers are usually unique within a year (though the New Year Honours for this period is normally the one which starts at page 1, so you need to allow a search range back into December as explained above). Then you simply put the the page number into the search engine with date(s) and then the awards are normally listed in alphabetical order on the page so it shouldn't be too hard to find after that.

Also, there are now the official indexes for the Gazette available on the website, if you download those, you should be able to get a page and issue number if you don't already have it.

Google's indexes suffer less from the problem mentioned abvoe of consecutive entries being run together, so a google search for "george day" site:www.london-gazette.co.uk may bring more hits, but there's no way of restricting the date range when doing this, so if you're looking for Fred Smith you'll probably be overwhelmed with false positives.

Finally, when you have a date, it can help to understand how the url is made up: to take one of the ones from above, http://www.london-gazette.co.uk/issues/30086/supplements/5033 the first element after the site name is always issues followed by / and the issue number then we can that this particular issue is a supplement as the next part is supplements, again followed by a / and then the page number. So if you are at the first or last page of a particular gazette, you can move to the previous or next one by reducing the issue number by one and the page number by one to move to the next earlier gaztte (and adding one to each to move to a later one from the last page). Sometimes you'll get a not found type error, this is usually because you're going from a supplement into a normal issue, try changing supplements to pages in the url (or vice-versa).

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Hi all,

Many thanks for your advice on searching the London Gazette website. I will be attempting to search again and hope to have better luck. Also thank you for the leads on Tough, Crumps and Churches. David I got the dates from 'The Worcestershire Regiment in the Great War' by Stacke, all the men I am researching served with the 2nd Battalion of the Worcesters.

Regards

Peter

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The advice above is excellent, but with a bit of luck you can find them very quickly. Especially with a service number.

I googled;

4893 tough "london gazette"

If you try that, you will see that the top six results are about your man, three gazette entries, this thread, and the Worcester pages you mention.

The only downside is that you can't navigate back through the Gazette pages to find out what it's about, however you are now armed with the page number and date.

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Forgot that bit, just delete /page.pdf off the end of theurls that Google returns, and you'll get the navigation bar back again (or just manually change the page number in the url...).

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Many thanks again to you all for your help, especially Diane. You have saved me some considerable time searching for Churces, Crump, Day and Edwards, this has shortened my list down to just five names now.

Again many thanks.

Regards

Peter

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Hi Diane,

All D.C.M. awards

Have now found Sgt. Wells and CSM Mayston so now down to three.

CQMS 8713 George Crump LG date 1/1/18 (I have his Bar award to his D.C.M.)

L/Cpl. 8914 Edward Lloyd LG date 3/6/19

Sgt. Ernest Welch LG date 5/8/15

All LG dates from Stacke.

Thanks again for the previous citations you supplied, it was a real help.

Regards

Peter

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Hi Diane

Many thanks for the time and trouble you have taken in finding the DCM citations that were proving such a problem for me. Yes George is indeed proving to be a difficult chap to find. I very much appreciate your help and everyone else who gave ideas on searching the LG site.

Best regards

Peter

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Is it just me or is there a problem with the LG search engine.

8713 George Crump M.C. LG date8.3.15

Peter

It's only this one that can't be found

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Can any explain why some citations should appear in the Edinburgh Gazette, and not the London Gazette?

Thanks

Steve

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The EG entries are basically repeats of the original LG entry, it's just the digitisation process sometimes happens to have been kinder to teh EG manking it easier to find those entries. Unfortunately I odn't think there's any way to work out which LG it would orignially ahve appeared in from the EG.

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Hi Diane and Dave,

I must apologise I have got the wrong date for 8713 George Crumps M.C., IT SHOULD BE 8.3.1919.

No wonder I had trouble with this one, again sorry for misleading you.

Regards

Peter

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