Police Gazette - Deserters & Absentees

Great to see that Findmypast has published a collection of Police Gazettes from the war years, these in turn courtesy of my old pal Graham Stewart.

The information given varies according to the category of absentees. Some men were deserters, others failed to turn up having attested under the Derby Scheme (or Group Scheme) whilst others refused to present themselves having been conscripted from 1916 onwards.

 

There are over 13,000 names in this niche collection which can be searched by forename, last name, year of birth, event year, regimental number, regiment or keyword.

 

 

Even if you have no personal interest in this particular collection it can be fascinating to browse through, and some of the tattoos described in the marks and remarks column are particularly interesting.

 

I offer a fast, efficient and cost-effective military research service. Have a look at my military research page and drop me a line if you think I might be able to help.

 

New Ancestry User Inter-face

 

I must say I like the look of the new Ancestry UI which has some very useful features, some of which I've tried to illustrate in the screenshot above.

 

The option to show the filmstrip is, admittedly, less useful when viewing medal index cards, but extremely helpful when looking at service records, particularly when you are looking for a particular document in a file. Here is the filmstrip from my great uncle's file:

 

 

Clicking on an image in the filmstrip brings up the main image, whilst simply hovering over a filmstrip image brings up a larger thumbnail:

 

 

 

So, we can quickly run through images if we need to, skipping those that are of no interest. And for those records that are difficult to read (and WO 363 is a challenging series at times) we can choose the option to view the image in negative which will often help pick out faded text and make it more legible.

 

 

Having discovered our ancestor's record, we can also choose to share our excitement on social media or send the image as an email. I tested this on Facebook last week. The only text I wrote was "Testing". 

 

 

Furthermore, Ancestry's method of delivering images has certainly improved. Gone are the tiles which you saw building on the screen before you. Now the images are delivered quickly and in one hit. It all makes for quite a slick service which is important if you know your way around the series and want to pop in an out quickly records, only selecting the images you want.

 

I offer a fast, efficient and cost-effective military research service. Have a look at my military research page and drop me a line if you think I might be able to help.