Filed under Gallantry Awards and Citations: A Method Guide
What to check first in this record
A posthumous award is one made after death, and its Gazette date will fall after the date of death. That gap is normal, so do not treat a later Gazette date as a contradiction of the casualty record.
Fix the person first, then the record. Searching for a record before you have fixed the person is how two people become one timeline. If a search starves you of results, drop one filter, not all of them. Dropping everything at once teaches you nothing about which filter was wrong.
How do you work through it step by step?
Keep the timeline open beside you as you work, and add to it as you go, rather than reconstructing it at the end from memory. Do not skip the step that checks the filters. It feels redundant when the filters seem obvious, and it is the step that catches wrong persons. A good session ends with the next step already named. If you finish a step without knowing the next one, the timeline, not the record, is telling you. If a step sends you back to an earlier one, that is the method working, not failing. Loops are how errors get caught.
- Find the published notice first, and note the award, rank, unit and date exactly as published.
- Look for the citation, where one was published, and read it as an official account of one act, not as a biography.
- Check name, rank and unit against the personal file before adding the award to the timeline.
- Use the citation to frame questions for unit records, not as a substitute for them.
Making sense of what you find
Dates decide meaning here: the same title, rank or place name can shift across a career, so anchor every term to its date before you interpret it. Read for the unit, the ship, or the station as well as for the person. A person entry makes sense only inside the unit entry that surrounds it.
A date written in one format on one sheet and another format on the next is the same date wearing two formats. Convert carefully, and keep the original. Entries in pencil, entries in ink, and entries stamped later are not the same kind of evidence. The medium often tells you when an entry was made.
Common traps in this record type
A search that works for one service may fail for another, because services filed differently. A method that fits the Army may mislead in the Navy, and vice versa. If every search returns the same wrong person, stop searching and re-examine the filters. Repeating a search with the same filters will repeat the same result. When a record set ends before your dates, or begins after them, the problem is coverage, and no variation of search terms will fix a coverage problem.
What should you check next?
A good next step narrows the search, rather than widening it. If the next record could be anything, the question is not yet sharp enough. The next step is usually a record that answers one specific thing: a date, a unit, a place, or a name, rather than a whole new area of research. The person you started with is the test for every next step. If a step loses that person, it is the wrong step, however interesting it looks.
Primary sources for this guide
This guide keeps its claims general and points to the official holders, so the holder itself is the place to check the current position. It is general educational information only, not personal professional advice, and it offers no record lookup service and no determination of any individual's service.