How Do I Identify the Right RAF Squadron?

What to check first in this record

Identify the squadron from the service record posting entries, not from a photograph, a badge or a family story alone. Postings give dates, and the squadron record for those dates is the one that matters.

Before you trust a match, ask what else it could be. A match with no rival explanation is stronger than a match you have not tried to break. Records disagree more often than stories do, and that is useful: a disagreement points to a transfer, a renumbering, or a variant spelling, each of which can be tested. The question to carry into every record is small: does this name, number, unit and date belong to the person I started with, or to someone like them?

How do you read what you find?

Corrections, crossings out and later additions are part of the evidence, not damage to it. A record corrected at the time tells you something changed. Read the file backwards as well as forwards. A later sheet often explains an earlier entry that looked, at first reading, like an error. A place name followed by a question mark, a correction, or a second spelling is the record telling you it is unsure. Carry that uncertainty into your notes.

Dead ends to expect here

A unit, ship or camp that cannot be fixed from the clues available is a reason to gather one more clue, not a reason to guess the most likely candidate. When two sources disagree and neither can be preferred, keep both in the timeline with a note. A forced choice now will mislead every later step.

A record destroyed, a record never created, and a record held elsewhere look identical from a search screen. The catalogue description is what tells them apart. Change one filter at a time, spelling, initials, number, unit or date range, and keep a note of which combinations you have already tried.

A step by step way through

Treat the steps below as a loop, not a ladder: a finding at a later step often sends you back to re-check an earlier one, and that is normal. Do not let a tool, a website, or an index set the order of your work. Tools serve steps; steps do not serve tools. A method that works is a slow one. Each step below earns the next, and skipping a step does not save time, it creates a check you will have to do later. Keep the original spelling of every name and place in your notes, even where you are confident of the modern form. Searches need originals.

1. Take the posting dates from the personal file before opening any unit record.
2. Open the operations record book for those dates only, and note its reference.
3. Check names, ranks and roles in crew or personnel lists against the personal file.
4. Use station records and published histories only after the unit record for those dates has been read.

The next record in the chain

Work the chain one link at a time. A timeline built link by link can be checked; a timeline built by jumping to the most interesting record cannot. The cluster around this guide is a chain, not a shelf. Reading it in chain order, following the links at the foot of each page, keeps the person in view.

If the timeline now has a gap with a name on each side of it, the next record is the one that could bridge that gap, and no other record will do. Leave the timeline in a state a stranger could retrace. That stranger, in six months, may well be you.