Completion of Project Big Push
The Western Front Association is pleased to announce the completion of the pension card project - Project Big Push!
Since the WFA rescued the WW1 pension cards from destruction and with the records digitised on Fold3, WFA volunteers have worked on a number of Pension Card projects since 2020 – Project Capture, Project Alias, Project Hometown, Project Disability and latterly Project Big Push. All of these have assisted and improved the ‘searchability’ of the records – the addition of ‘hometown’ information itself can help enormously for researchers, as can the information on ‘aliases’. And of course, these records are free for WFA members to access via the WFA website!
Focusing on the Soldiers Survived pension cards, Project Big Push was the most ambitious of all – with a dataset of over 5 million images. Work commenced on the project in February 2021 with six teams, all named after WW1 Generals – Birdwood (Team Leader – Tim Walton); Byng (Team Leader - Martin Pieroni), Gough (Team Leader – Mike Akerman); Horne (Team Leader – Pat Miller); Plumer (Team Leader – Margaret Hawkins) and Rawlinson (Team Leader – Carolyn Postgate). Around 190 WFA members stepped up to carry out the (sometimes tedious) process of going through their allotted cards.
The approach was twin-pronged. In the first stage of the work, volunteers identified those cards which had an alias, name error or hometown noted. On completion of this stage in July 2022, over 5,040,000 images had been checked – with over 106,000 name corrections of which 17,000 were aliases and over 1,131,000 Hometown corrections identified.
Attention then switched to ensure that all the cards identified were appropriately updated, with a smaller group of volunteers carrying out the amendments to the pension cards on Fold3. Many more months of truly hard graft ensued as the pension cards were amended, with completion of the project finally achieved by mid April 2023. By this time, over 106,000 alias/name amendments and 1,140,000 Hometown amendments had been made.
Throughout the project, the team leaders produced a weekly ‘progress report’ for their teams, ably assisted by Peter West who has managed the IT side of the project. These reports were supplemented by research that had been carried out on some of the more interesting cards that had been found – as highlighted in the earlier Bulletin article. Much of this work was done by Alan Hawkins (husband of Margaret, the Team Plumer’s Team Leader), often picking up on potential cards of interest highlighted by volunteers.
Over such a long running project, it is hardly surprising that friendships have been formed, with some team leaders meeting up with team members where geography allowed. A real sense of ‘community of interest’ has been engendered within the teams, largely due to the unstinting efforts of the team leaders to enthuse and engage their team members.
The Western Front Association wishes to sincerely thank all those who have been involved in this massive project – its completion means that the pension card records will be a huge resource for future researchers seeking information on those who served in WW1, and summed up admirably by one volunteer thus:
“The statistics are impressive, but what has kept my nose to the grindstone is the thought of honouring (in my small way) the service that all those men and their families gave, together with the thought that our efforts will make the WFA database more meaningful for searchers and researchers of all kinds”.
Another volunteer has commented
“I'll have to start with all the little jobs I've been putting off for months! Can't the WFA come across another 6m record cards from somewhere?”
At the recent AGM in April 2023 at the National Army Museum, the President of the WFA, Professor Gary Sheffield, particularly remarked on the contribution that volunteers on WFA had made –the volunteers on Project Big Push can be particularly commended for their tenacity and devotion to the longest running project ever tackled by the Association!
