This was because I remembered we have a death certificate for Thomas PARRY, my great grandfather's brother, who died out in South Africa, during the Boer War, and I suddenly realised that I wasn't sure of the answer to the question of how these deaths were recorded. Do they appear in the online civil registration death indexes in some way, despite many of them taking place abroad? If so, then what impact are they having on the 'normal' figures.
Having checked the copy of the certificate for Thomas, I see that it is actually headed up "Registration of Births, Deaths and Marriages (Special Provisions) Act 1957", as opposed to most of the normal copy certificates, which state "Pursuant to the Births and Deaths Registration Act 1953". Typed in one corner is "An entry in an Army Register Book of Deaths in the South African War 1899-1902" and other text states that it is a "true copy of the certified copy of an entry made in a Service Departments Register".
So there were separate registers for the war deaths. However, it appears that those injured in the war and repatriated to the UK, who subsequently died, as well as the personnel from the Royal Navy, or merchant seaman, killed by enemy action and whose bodies were brought ashore, were registered by the local registrars.*
It would take too long to go through all the PARRY deaths I've previously extracted from the Commonwealth War Graves Commission site, to try to identify which ones might also be included in the normal indexes and so relate the statistics to those in the Challenge Post 7. But this does seem an opportunity to write something about the CWGC figures during the same time period.
My first extraction of the PARRY entries from the CWGC site was probably back about 2006, as part of normal data collection towards the one-name study. But I'd repeated the process in 2013, when it had been my intention to do a project on them during the centenary period (28 July 2014 - 11 November 2018). Unfortunately, I didn't manage that project, as the centenary began in the months following the death of a close relative and my time was spent dealing with other issues.
So this time I began by checking the current index back to my earlier extractions, as it is often useful to check for updates to such sites. I didn't keep a record of how I searched last time, but I imagine I just used a straightforward search for the surname. If so, then it seems there have been some changes to the search process and results found. Previously, double barrelled surnames that began with PARRY were included, as was the surname "PARRYMAN". This time, however, double barrelled surnames where PARRY is the second part were also included in the results, and the "PARRYMAN" entry was no longer included. There were some changes to names - some mispellings were corrected and a couple of entries that were just initials now contain the casualty's full name. There were also changes to some service numbers.
This graph shows the total numbers of PARRY deaths on the CWGC site for the period 1914 - 1921:
[Note: This is just PARRYs - I haven't included any of the double barrelled surnames etc, as the previous Blog posts in this series only related to registrations for the one surname, PARRY, not any of the combination names]
Graphs can be used to show the data in a variety of ways, which can then lead into other types of investigations. Here, for example, they are broken down by Service type:
As one might expect, in World War 1, the army bore the brunt of the casualties. But viewing the figures like this might prompt the question of how many PARRYs were in each of the Services, and whether the casualty rates were proportional to that, or not.
The deaths could be displayed in terms of the country they served with, perhaps linking in to emigration of PARRYs and, again, the question of proportionality - were the death rates for the countries the same, and the higher figures for the UK PARRYs merely the product of the UK being the location for the origin of the surname:
With regard to where battles were, the deaths could be displayed in terms of the country the memorial is in:
It is possible to plot these memorial figures the other way round, ie places within each year. But, since the numbers vary considerably, the story such a graph could tell would seem limited.
And, sometimes, only a table of data can bring home the more human cost of individual events:
*
War death registers and local registrations -
https://history.blog.gov.uk/2017/11/10/the-general-register-office-and-the-first-world-war/
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