Developing my own medal research tool

[Great Dane]

The following story may - at first look - seem to be aimed specifically at my field of interest, but I hope it will serve as an inspiration for others as well. The problem is quite 'universal'

1. The problem:

The problem is trying to find the recipient of an unnamed medal group (or miniature group).

In my case I collect Danish decorations. My sources are some unofficial volumes which were infrequently published (7 volumes between 1903 and 1970) and which contains lists of people decorated with the Danish Order of Dannebrog (as per the year they were published). Each volume contains thousands of small biographies (basically name, list of decorations and 10-15 lines bio). The limitation of using these volumes as sources is of course that the recipient of a medal group had to be decorated with the Order of Dannebrog - otherwise he won't be in there.

So far a match were attempted by meticulously comparing the list of decorations in each bio with the medal group in question. Very very tedious work...! There were tens of thousands biographies to check, and the next time an unnamed group showed up, I had to start all over again.

There simply had to be an easier way...

My goal was to be able to input a list of decorations (those present in the medal group) into a PC and get a list of possible recipients as output. I could then lookup the candidates in the printed volumes to get more information.

2. First approach:

First I considered to scan each page and OCR it to get a searchable result. It would be quite a time consuming task, but it had to be done only once. However, this solution had some disadvantages:

• Scanning 100 year old books without damaging them could be difficult.
• The scans might need a 'touch-up' before they were fed to the OCR engine. That would be even more time consuming.
• A search is an 'exact science'. If I searched for, say, 'S.Sv.' (the abbreviation used for the Swedish Order of the Sword), I wouldn't catch the typos 'SSv.' (missing point) or 'S. Sv.' (added space).
• I would only be able to search for one string at a time. A search for 'S.Sv.' would give thousands of hits, which had to be examined one by one to check if that recipient had received the other decorations in the group as well.

Hmm... the benefits of this approach really didn't seem to justify the trouble...

3. The solution:

I decided to use a spreadsheet (Excel) for the task. Each row would contain a name and a list of his decorations (one cell for each decoration). This information had to be entered manually (still a time consuming task but again had to be done only once).

I decided to leave out the class information from the list of decorations, because I assumed there would be cases where I couldn't identify the class of a given decoration in a group. No need to limit myself there...

3.1 Digitizing the sources:

Using Excel had some advantages - the AutoComplete functionality was nice and I wrote a macro which - after entering a complete volume - could compare my entries to a list of 'approved' decoration abbreviations. That way I would catch typos made in the data entry phase. I considered to use a database, but although the 'search & compare' task will save me a lot of time it isn't very complicated. A database would be overkill.

3.2 Extracting the data:

I wrote two macros - a 'search by name' and a 'search by decorations'. This gives me the following possibilities:

• Searching by name is useful if I want to research a named award document. Enter the name, press the button, and I will have a chronological list of which volumes that guy is listed in.
• I can search for ANY combination of decorations - even subsets (useful if the recipient's list of decorations includes Commander and Grand Cross classes which will not be present in the mounted group or if he received a decoration after the volume was published). There is no restrictions in which order I enter the decorations to be searched for.

4. An example:

My tool has proven to be extremely useful for me over the last couple of years. This is the latest example:

I bought a mounted group of 4. The decorations were mounted 'Danish style' and the first decoration was the Order of Dannebrog, so the primary condition was fulfilled (I have attached a (not very good) picture of the group below to spice up my long ranting). The group came in a flat unoriginal cardboard box padded with cotton wool.

The other decorations were the Italian Order of the Crown, the Romanian Order of the Star and the Austrian Red Cross decoration. I entered the four decorations in my tool, pressed the button and the result was one match (the result also showed that noone had the four decorations as a subset and the guy with the match was not listed with additional decorations in later volumes).

I looked him up in the printed volume and the classes of the decorations matched the group 100%.

Normally the story would end here but this example had an extra twist: I felt pretty confident that I had found the correct recipient and was about to throw away the cardboard box, when suddenly I discovered a small stamp-size note under the cotton wool. On it was written the very same name that I just found

I realize this post seems like I'm padding my own back, but this tool has removed a lot of the tedious part of medal research for me. I realize that 'your mileage may vary' (different sources, different conditions, different problems etc.) but I just felt it could inspire others to try something similar.

/Mike

[Chris B.]

Mike, good idea! It shows initiative and a real love of the hobby. By the way, the Italian order of the Crown looks a lot like the crown on the Austrian order of the Iron Crown. Are they related? Cheers, Chris.

[Great Dane]

Chris, Thanks for the kind words

The Iron Crown is an old Italian 'relic'.

The (Austrian) Order of the Iron Crown was created by Napoleon when he was being crowned as King of Italy in 1805. The Austrian Emperor Francis I re-instituted it in 1816 after Napoleon's fall.

The Italian Order of the Crown was created in 1868 and shows the same Iron Crown in the center.

/Mike

[Jacky]

Very Nice done great Dane,

Such a investment in time, but so much reward in ease......

Thank you for sharing your story!!

Chris B.

Yes the crown is the same,

First instituted by napoleon, later accepted by the Austrian Emperors...

THe order of the Iron Crown were first a napoleonic order, after Napoleon Austria-Hungaria annexed several parts of Italia, but also the order of the Iron Crown,

After the Italian Monarchy came, they used the crown again... In the Crown order of Italia.

*oh, sorry didn't see the post of Great Dane, anyway he's right*

Kind regards,

Jacky

Edited August 17, 2006 by Jacky

[g_deploige]

Mike, good idea! It shows initiative and a real love of the hobby. By the way, the Italian order of the Crown looks a lot like the crown on the Austrian order of the Iron Crown. Are they related? Cheers, Chris.

Chris

If you want to see some beautifull pieces about the Iron Crown created by Napoleon look to this page of the Royal Army Museum in Brussels

[Paul C]

Mike, great job with the spreadsheet and I share your frustration with search through books for medal ids. My area is Imperial German medal and ribbon bars. The ranklists detail most all of the pre-1914 information that I need. I have also thought of scanning and OCRing the pages of the ranklists but at this time the technology is not there to do it. I looked high and low for the software but it does not exist. I did scan many ranklists into PDF format and have put them on CD for sale.

[g_deploige]

The best you can do is to use a database, you can make it your self see www.filemaker.com

whith this database programme you can make containerfields where you can store images, and files like PDF.

It is a very strong tool, it is even crossplatform and can be used on a Mac computer (Apple) or a PC.

Some museums are working with this tool to manage their collections see The succes story sorry that it is in dutch, but the Royal Army Museum is ussing this tool for different databases.

Edited August 25, 2006 by g_deploige

[ErikMuller]

The best you can do is to use a database, you can make it your self see www.filemaker.com

whith this database programme you can make containerfields where you can store images, and files like PDF.

It is a very strong tool, it is even crossplatform and can be used on a Mac computer (Apple) or a PC.

Some museums are working with this tool to manage their collections see The succes story sorry that it is in dutch, but the Royal Army Museum is ussing this tool for different databases.

Aren't we spoiled in The Netherlands? Our rank lists from 1856-1900 are available in PDF, so are our Nobility Yearbooks till 1986, Ruling Families Yearbooks till 1992, and the pre-1900 Biographical Dictionaries. Very handy when researching (general) officers.

For most of my research I use online newspapers in combination with geanological websites. The last ones often refer to published sources elsewhere and an e-mail to the makers of these sites often result in very good information (often, not always).