The National Archives Catalogue on Excel

Hello Andy,

Is the catalogue (excel) at Message # 14 up to date?

Best,

Steve.

 

As far as I'm aware - what are you after?

 

Possibly time to look at 72nd Field Regiment, RA.

WO 166/1498
WO 167/493

-which cover the period Sept 1939 to March 1941.

Do you already have these?

Best,

Steve.

 

I have the WO 167 file.

 

PM sent!

Best,

Steve.

 

Hello Andrea,
I seem to have no luck in tracing my fathers military history I wonder if you can help ,he is 1410900 John Thomas Butterworth I believe he was at Pegasus Bridge with the 2nd Ox and Bucks.
Regards pete

 

Hi Pete,

Andrea is my partner and doesn't visit often, only when I let her. Anyway I digress, the diary you are after is WO 171/1357 2 Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry Jan-Dec 1944.

You may also be interested in this one: WO 171/5254 2 Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry Jan-May 1945

Cheers
Andy

 

Hello all, I have only uploaded part one of the headquarters papers held at Kew. I'm having difficulty uploading some of part 2 due to the size of some of the files. I have PM'd the Admin for assistance.

I'm currently working all the war diaries held at Kew at the moment. Andy tell's me these are the bread and butter files for your research so bare with me as some of them are rather large compared to the ones I have uploaded so far. I expect they will take at least few more weeks yet to complete.
I'm new to the forum but having seen the efforts you are obviously putting into indexing mountains of WWII paper I thought you might just be the person to ask first of all about "where to look". I am trying to ascertain the circumstances/files/documents surrounding the decision to transfer an SOE officer from the UK to SRD (the Australian equivalent) in 1944 from the UK end. As I am in Australia I am also trying to find the Aust Military Forces end.

I think there should be documentation surrounding the decision to send him to the colonies. His name was Seymour Bingham (Maj) former head of N Section (Holland).

Rumours abound about his role/responsibility (negligence or treachery??) for the collapse of the SOE Holland network with great loss of life and much has been written but as a lawyer I prefer to see original source material to form my own views.

My interest is that he was sent here and then headed up a section of SRD which was running an operation in Timor which was already captured by the Japs - including my father - and then had the bad luck to oversee the insertion of further teams (much like the Englandspiel fiasco) which were killed/captured.

I have Bingham's Personnel File and details but it throws limited light on the matters that interest me, namely what was being said about him at higher levels leading to the decision to send him here. Any guidance you can give me would be greatly appreciated even if it is only to refer me to another forum member for assistance.

 

Andrea is my partner and she's banned from posting on here unless it's a Excel Sheet.

Ref your query I would speak to Steve (Jedburgh) as he does a lot of reserach into the SOE during WW2.

 

View attachment CAB 44.xls

I've been wanting to publish the CAB 44 Series for sometime now and I think it's finally sorted. There's some cracking files in here especially if you are interested in the France and Flanders, North African and North West Europe campaigns

 

Great stuff many thanks for all your hard work

 

*
Hello Andy,

I'm bumping this thread, specifically Message #31, because I believe the link to the spreadsheet mentioned therein has corrupted. Does the link work for you?

Best,

Steve.

 

Hi Steve - Some of them I need to upload again, I think they were lost in the transfer from the old forum. Are you looking for something specific or can it wait for now?

A

 

Hello Andy,

Just when you get around to it... I was more concerned to let you know there was a possible problem with the link(s); just in case you didn't already know.

Best,

Steve.

 

Lee do you know where your post/thread is on this? The link now goes to a Dunkirk related pages

 

Andy, the 'build a query' functions sadly went with the switch to Discovery.
Here's a way of exporting from Discovery as a spreadsheet.


Say you want all files in a particular series, e.g. FO 898, type it into the search like this including the double quotes "FO 898/*".

At the top right of the results page is a "Download" button. Click that and select CSV spreadsheet.

The down side is that it is limited to 1,000 records at a time.

If there's more than a 1,000 results per record series/search then you'll need to grab the spreadsheets in blocks, e.g.

"FO 898/1*";
"FO 898/2*";
"FO 898/3*";
etc.

and then cut n' paste the ten separate spreadsheets into one.

Edit: strike the above, it won't work for over a 1,000 results because searching for "FO 898/1*" will return 1011 results. 11 results will be lost in the export.


Also you'll want to sort them into the right order. The trick here is to use the 'URLParams' field to do the sort:

CTRL-A to select everything in Excel;
Click the down arrow next to "Sort & Filter" and select "Custom Sort...";
Make sure "My data has headers" is checked;
Sort by "URLParams";
(Before doing this lengthen the cell sizes so not to muck up the spreadsheet formatting. Otherwise it results in rows with a too large height).

And this is just another reason why I hate 'Discovery'!

Lee

 

Confused - So can it be done? The series I'm looking at contains over 5,000 files?

 

Over a 1,000 results then no, I can't think of an easy way of doing it using Discovery functionality.

A web page scraper would be the way to go.

 

FFS - I have no idea what that means. That's me pissed for the rest of the day then. I've found some good contenders lately as well !

 

Leave it with me for a few days and I'll come up with something to do it.

I was spitting feathers at the loss of the 'build a query' function, it was seriously powerful.
But it also could be used to massively abuse their system so not a surprise it went.