Just a quick tip (from personal experience)

[kevinpargeter]

Hi all,

Just a quick tip which may help some of you. This is from personal experience, I was searching for my Gt Grandad, I knew his name was Thomas Crump, and from speaking to my nan and her sister (the resident family historians) I also knew for absolute certain that he never had a middle initial. Additionally I knew that he won the DCM, which as you know does narrow the search somewhat.

I duly searched all T Crumps and ignored all the hits that were men with a middle initial. Unfortunately, one the men I did ignore was listed on the Kew returns on mic searches as Thomas D Crump.

Derek Robertson, who runs a quite excellent site where you can list your medal and death plaque wants, emailed me a link to a Thomas D Crump.

When I downloaded the card from Kew, guess what. Yep there was no middle initial on the card and it was the right man. It turns out that the mic had a note of the DCM right next to the end of his christian name which the OCR (optical character recognition) on their computer had interpreted the first D of DCM as an initial.

So I guess the lesson is don`t discount the extra middle initial if everything else fits with what you know. Alternatively this could be a one off and I got lucky.

Special thanks to Derek Robertson.

Kev.

[Alan Lines]

Kev

Definately not a one off, there are lots of "minor" errors on these cards. I was looking for William Heaman Cooke last week who turned out to be William Cook.