Update to the Nominal Roll

Personal circumstances have forced me away from broad research, emails and general site activities recently, owing to Mum’s health taking a dip and the family having to take it in turn’s to go down and be with her – but for 97, she’s still going strong!

The time has at least allowed me to push on with the data entry for the Nominal Roll. As I have noted in previous posts, this is a colossal task and will potentially dwarf the Crew Op History database, when it is finally (if ever) completed. Aside from the gathering and researching of information on the individuals in the roll, it’s entry into the database and the subsequent generation of entries for the NR section of the site has proved to be quite problematic – some individuals, such as Dad, flew with just one crew for each of his tours – others have (so far) flown with 8 during their stay with the Squadron.

Initially I had arranged the database with a series of repeated sections to record each crew that an individual might have been part of – resulting in a series of ‘blank’ lines which would contain joining text such as “Flew with xxxx for xxx Ops as xxxx” but no actual data as they were extra to that individual. Initially, I was happy with this and thought I could just delete the empty rows of each entry when I added the information to the relevant page. Of course, as this project has continued, the individual secondary editing of entries prior to publishing is a completely ridiculous strategy, given there are approximately 3,500 individuals contained in the list.

At the start of the new year I decided I had to dig deeper into the database and give it the intelligence to understand presence and absence of data and give it the ability to subsequently gather the separate pieces of information in a presentable format, automatically. 3 months later I am pleased to present the next stage of the NR project – All of the A’s have been updated to the next level of data completion – this will steadily increase as repeated sweeps are performed or new information comes in on individuals, but as you will see, it s shows a significant upgrade from the basic name and trade position that remains for the time, for the rest of the NR section. Perhaps a little smugly, I would draw your attention to the fact that the entries added have been added as is, straight from the database – the only work I have done is to bold the surname and add a divider line between each individual’s entry.

I have also taken the decision to generate a ‘completion’ rate for each individual. In discussion with Chris, it seems that at least the post war “Manna” flights were counted as a third of an Op, however in the absence of confirmation for the other post war sorties, the CR figure is based on completed operational sorties undertaken during the War. Broadly, an Op that resulted in the individual’s death, capture etc have been not counted, but an entry of this kind does reflect the event – the individual in question having for example 7 Ops as completed, but killed on the 8th Op. I am aware that there are instances where an aircraft would have been bought down after bombing and thus the sortie would count – these will be identified and corrected accordingly in time.

View the new updated ‘A’ section of the Nominal Roll here.