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Re: RAF records
There is no idication anywhere on the UK National Archives site that you would be able to find information on WW2 airmen from searching on it? Think about it, someone would have to type up an immense database, on public money? not anytime soon.
The AIR78 files are part of the free Documents on line, Digitial Microfilm project or offering. You find the batch of downloads that might contain your airman/woman's name, download that PDF or batch of PDF's and with luck you will find their full name/serial number. And that is all you will find, its not service records, its just thousands of pages of microfilm, each page having 8 little peices of paper with a persons name and serial number.
You have to search the downlaoded file manually as the typing onthe microfilmed pages is very poor in most cases and OCR text scanners probably wouldn't pick it up, so no, you do not electronically search the file, you scroll using mark 1 human eye-ball. Not so bad as long as your not looking for John Smiths.
The London Gazette government publication lists promotions and awards to RAF personel, so you of course won't find the vast majority of non commishioned airmen in there, they have no reason to be mentioned there in unless they received an award for their service.
Promotion names in the London Gazette are published in the format
12345 John James SMITH (123567) where the first number is the enlisted number, the airmans number assigned at enlistment, the second number in brackets is the persons new officers number underwhich he will appear under for ever more in the LG. A problem is that the first non-com number is not seen properly by the LG search engine, so one can basically never find an airman via his non-com number in these lists. The search engine thinks the number is joined to the line before it and ain;t smart enough to see it. Of course sometimes it might work, THERE ARE NO HARD AND FAST RULES with searchign the LG, just general patterns. The page quality may mean that the scanned text is recognised as jibberish and the font the use gets easily mixed up in its g 9, 1 i etc, so a number 1 can be seen as an i by the OCR. Dirt on the page can manifest itself as a full stop in the middle of a name, like John Sm.ith, or a phantom space might show up, John Sm ith.
generally search for:
officers number if known
full name if know
name with initials and full stops on the initials, if known
T. D. Horne
try D. Horne
Once your man gets commishioned, his name will appear only as initials charting his subsuquent promotions, but as many other times, his name may appear in full.
Flight Global pre war did publish postings yes, search from within their search engine, i can;t recall the format of how they present Squadon numbers but its something like
57 Sqdn. or 57 Sqn. The Flight Global engine picks up on strings of phrases only, It will find 57 Sqn. but can't pick up on 57 Sq for example. Similar to the LG search engine.
if you had the PDF's downloadaed and combined into multipage files, then yes, you coudl search to your hearts content for strings of letters and numbers, but whos got the time to download these things and combine them and then store them, blah blah
Time for lunch.
The only chance of finding things easy on a database is in few years time when they pass the databases over to someone like ancestry.com who have armies of volunteer transcribers, and who may eventually give something like public access for a fee. Course all us sad wally researchers will be retiring and dying and who will be left to give a stuff???
meanwhile, learn to use the CWGC, LG, AIR78 and Flight global as best you can. Practice makes perfect.
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