Over the past week, Several features were added to the RAF CWGC Database on the site. Start with this link
http://www.rafcommands.com/database/…lno=&qt=&cur=0
1. Date Search now supports Month (YYYY-MM) in addition to Year and Actual Date
2. Results now show Trade (in Yellow box), Aircraft type and serial (in blue box) and AIR/NA/Forum reference in Red or YEllow box.
3. You can also search by aircraft serial number or by trade (search boxes on top)
4. Clicking on the serial number of an aircraft in this view will take you to the detail page – http://www.rafcommands.com/database/…php?uniq=L9297 that will show Casualities, AIR references, related posts in the forum that contain that ac’s serial.
5. Finally gives a feature to link Henk’s / Alex’s Unaccounted airmen thread posts to the airmen entries – i did this for 1947 – eg http://www.rafcommands.com/database/…php?qdate=1947
There are a total of 124319 casuality records in this database. About 3292 records (2.65%) have the extra details populated. i.e all entries from 1939-01-01 till 1940-06-30 (just ten months of the war!)
These entries are being made through a specially created webpage. As this is all manual work in linking entries to serials and references, I would definitely appreciate extra help / volunteers for this. If you are interested in supporting the data entry work, register on RAFCommands Forum and send me an email on admin AT rafcommands.com. This is the webpage. To use it you just use the forum credentials (after i give permissions), to login to a webpage and entries can be made..
If you are wondering how long the work takes – for a dedicated person making use of AIR81 records, it took about one day ( a regular holiday) to process about 1000 records – but that was made easy by the availability of the AIR81 records, and dual monitors and years of copy/paste typing experience (Ctrl C, Ctrl P etc).. Once the AIR81 records (Which currently are upto mid 1941) are exhausted, then the sourcing will have to be done through the NA ORBs. That will slow up the process a lot.