The Part II Daily Orders of The RCR (The Overseas Battalion; 1915-19)

[Michael OLeary]

DAILY ORDERS, PART II

Residing in the Library and Archives Canada (LAC) are millions of pages of documentation on Canadian units and soldiers of the First World War. Among these are the Regiment's War Diary, which I completed a transcription of and posted to my website after retiring from the Reg F.  This was possible to complete at little cost because the war diary pages are provided through an online facility, but only as images which did not support textual searches of the information.

With my own research interests focused on the life and experiences of soldiers in the Regiment, it was natural to continue to a follow-on task concerning the Part II Daily Orders for the overseas battalion.  Unfortunately, this also required a small financial investment to acquire the needed material.  LAC charges 40 cents per page plus postage, but I was able to obtain digital photos of the pages for about half that cost through a researcher in the Ottawa area.  (Although I do have to add to that hundreds of hours over the past eight months or so to transcribe the data into a usable format.)

The Part II Daily Orders for The RCR (CEF) consist of about 1200 typewritten legal sized pages (sadly some pages are missing). These have supported the creation of a regimental nominal roll with 4820 entries for the overseas battalion of the Regiment. This does include a few double and triple entries where men changed either service numbers or names (i.e., "Having declared his true name to be ....").

I have also compiled a database table of 17,461 Part II Daily Orders notes to support researching individual soldiers of the Regiment.

These include changes of strength both TOS and SOS (8497), men proceeding on leave (1804), punishments (1350), and the remainder subdivided into another 65 different item categories.

I haven't yet decided how I'm going to roll this massive amount of data out, and may just spend a while mining it for website and regimental journal articles first.

[Michael OLeary]

From a response I created earlier today for another forum, this gives an example of the data mining possibilities of the Daily Order Part II and the nominal roll its transcription helped to create in a database format:

Mike, out of curiousity, which battalions, broken up in England, ended up reinforcing the RCR during the war?

Hi Chris, that is a question that I have been pondering.  I did some fast number crunching, accepting that there will be a number of small inconsistencies without a more rigorous review of the data set first (such as eliminating nominal roll records where one man is entered twice under two names and the same svc no).

I took the group of 6 and 7-digits service numbers, and extracted just the left 3 or 4 digits to do a count by 1000-man blocks (yes some were split in the allocation, but this is a rough cut at it).

The 4445 soldiers with 6 and 7 digit numbers came from 232 blocks of 1000 numbers. Of these 53 provided 10 or more soldiers to the overseas battalion of The RCR.

I then decided to only examine further those "1000 blocks" with 40 or more. Of these (23) some fell together in the allocations of service numbers, leaving 16 allocation number blocks providing a little over 3400 soldiers.

And, these are:

1646 - RCR
372 - 1st Depot Bn, NSR
230 - 59th Battalion
193 - 112th Battalion
150 - 97th Battalion
135 - 212th Battalion
108 - 106th Battalion
96 - 112th Battalion
96 - 185th Battalion
78 - 140th Battalion
75 - 237th Battalion
59 - 114th Battalion
55 - MD 6 / 63rd Regt Comp Bn
50 - 53rd Battalion
44 - 193rd Battalion
41 - 33rd Battalion

As mentioned, there is scope for a much more careful analysis.