Miniature 9 pce chain - I.D. possible?

[Biro]

Normally I'm sceptical of ID'ing mini chains - but this one dosen't look messed with...

Any of you who dwelleth in dark caves with rolls and candlelight care to try and pin a recipient to this little fellah?

cheers

Marshall

[Scott]

Beautiful - hope you can ID the owner.

[Guest Rick Research]

Nooooooooooooooo. What throws things off here is absence of a long service award.

I can't turn up any match on a first run through. :(

[David M]

Nooooooooooooooo. What throws things off here is absence of a long service award.

I can't turn up any match on a first run through.

Interesting...just out of curiousity is it because the rolls for the awards are not all there? I mean how many combo's could there be with the HHOX, MeckG3, OFJ and the Sachson combined? Are there to many candidates or is there another problem? Again I am not questioning your research ( who would dare to ) I am just wondering what the problem is in this specific case.

Hope you forgive me

David

[Biro]

Nooooooooooooooo. What throws things off here is absence of a long service award.

I can't turn up any match on a first run through.

Thanks for trying Rick!!

Appreciated.

Marshall

[Guest Rick Research]

It's a combination of

1) the Gnome Collective is slaving on 1914-1918 Rolls (what exist and what we HAVE) so that the HORRIBLE prospect of somehow entering all PRE-war awards back for decades has not been done and

2) variables.

Viz.--

a) is that a PEACETIME Franz Joseph Order, or is it a WARTIME one?

b) is that REALLY a Griffin-KNIGHT... or might it be here as a "Kleindekoration" OFFICER grade pinback?

Sadly, neither the HOH3X nor the SA3aX rolls are COMPLETE, so there is always the roll of the dice that one or both might NOT be on a Roll.

There are no GERMAN rolls for the ?M3K and TH, so unless the person is already Known To The Gnomes (via Reichswehr Rank Lists or more obscure sources) those are... invisible.

All of this reduces the chain to PROBABLY a RAO4 and MG3, someone in military service March 1897... who does NOT have any long service award at all (very very strange) who has some COMBINATION of all the other awards...

some or any of which may NOT be on the Gnome Radar as of now.

So it isn't as "easy" as it looks when we DO pull names out of thin air--that is, out of the combined labor of our handful of data slaves' 30 years of working at this.

I am rather bothered by the absence of any long service award, which suggests, if this is a Real Person's chain, that said wearer was a zD type who managed to squeak in a Red Eagle Order before a XXV and was called back into a combat position for the war and yet did NOT accumulate enough service from that to be creditted with an XXV Cross. A reserve officer (with no LD2 despite service as far back as 1896???) seems less likely given the Hohenzollern and peacetime/wartime awards.

It is HIGHLY likely that this person CAN be identified, but not with what we have at the moment, based on the definitely pre-war awards. For instance-- in service 22 March 1897 but OUT of service before getting a long service award means... retired WHEN?

Doesn't do any good to look for an RAO4/MG3 pair in 1912... if the RAO4 was a retirement present in 1913... or if the Lucky Rittmeister left the service in 1909... or 1907... or 1902...

which means looking for a PAIR of awards throughout the entire Prussian army and Imperial navy every single year between 1897 and 1914 and THEN tracking down ALL of those persons to see if they might match up to already known HOH3Xs and SA3aXs sitting there on transcribed Rolls that have not had those pre-war decorations noted.

Which would basically require about a human week's work... and STILL not be guaranteed success. None of us have ALL the Rank Lists, and said RAO4 might only have been granted in retirement and NOT while on active duty. There is also the Prussian No First Names, so while we may well have "Major Schmidt" listed THREE times with 3 separate awards... we have (as yet) been able to VERIFY that those "three" Schmidts are, in fact, all the same man--or TWO men... or even, actually, THREE Schmidts after all.

Realize that "instant answers" are NOT. All "easy" identifications are ONLY because of decades of accumulating jigsaw puzzle pieces of unrelated data and combining them on some 150,000++ pre-war officers.

[David M]

Hi Rick

Thank you for going into that so thoroughly. I hope you were not under the impression that the Gnome-job is an easy one.... I was just wondering, but now I fully understand why these kinds of change are not easy to research.

regards

David