MIC's v Medal Rolls

[stiletto_33853]

Question, which were done first. Continuing with my research there appears to be huge differences between the two, spelling, numbers etc etc with up to 5 MIC's found for one man. Same man, different spellings which can make life a little awkward sometimes tieing them down.

Any thoughts on this.

Andy

[6th Shropshires]

Hi Andy

Without knowing for sure, I would say the medal roll first then the index, I say that because you have to have the text in the roll first before it can be indexed.

Annette

[stiletto_33853]

Hi Annette,

Thanks for the input, I would tend to agree and that is what I have been led to believe. However the MIC's are all over the place with people of the same number but different surnames, multiple MIC's with different spellings but the same man. It makes one wonder just what came first.

In your research are you finding the same???.

Andy

[per ardua per mare per terram]

Both MICs and medal rolls were done by hand before computers, as we know them were even a dream.

A handful of clerks (possibly suffering from post traumatic stress if they had been in a war zone) had to compile these rolls and indexes to a timetable that, even if they had computers, was tight. A battalion (ignoring casualties, just to keep this simple) is around 1,000 men, most regiments expanded to 10 bn or more. Even with my simplistic approach that's 10,000 men to keep track of, there are bound to be mistakes - how many typos do you see in 10,000 emails?

There's an old admin adage that you can get a system 95% perfect but 100% is rarely achieved. For 5 1/2 million MICs that 5% gives 275,000 mistakes. IMHO I’m amazed that we find so few on the originals. Even with my limited experience, I've found more errors with the online transcriptions than I have with the originals.