Searching Allied Screening Commission Helper Claims

Link: https://catalog.archives.gov/id/52088435
Search page: https://catalog.archives.gov/search-within/52088435

Numbering and geography

The US National Archives and Records Administration holds records of claims for reimbursement made to the Allied Screening Commission by Italian helpers who aided allied Prisoners Of War in Italy. These claims are slowly being digitised and released as part of a project in partnership with the Monte San Martino Trust. At the time of writing, 1,394 of 88,026 claims have been digitised. Those 1,394 claims span 18,524 images - an average of 13 images per claim.

Each claim was assigned a number between 1-83424 and 100001-104603 (late claims). The numbering of claims follows a geographic pattern - claims from a particular area or village tend to cluster together. Each cluster is not necessarily the totality of claims from that area and areas often appear in new clusters with higher numbered claims.

These geographic patterns are based around where the claim was made and not where the help was provided. Consequently names can pop up in claims made in unexpected areas. You need to read the claim carefully to understand where the help was provided and assume it was near the claimant's address.

Structure of the claim

Each claim starts with a cover page. The second page is a standard "Claim summary" form that provides an overview of the help provided. On many claims the list of prisoners assisted on the summary is the totality of people who feature in the claim but this is not always the case and you should check carefully.

Some documents in the claim appear with very little explanation or context. It's not clear why they are included or if they have been misfiled from other claims. Some claims contain graphic images of death and violence. The website provides you with no warning and you should be prepared for this before browsing any claims.

Prisoners stuck together and regularly appear over and over again in the same claims. If you have an interest in a particular prisoner, it can be helpful to look at records that mention their associates.

Searching

All the images have been processed with OCR (Optical Character Recognition) and this is fully searchable. The OCR is imperfect but usable. The OCR and the documents contain a lot of spelling mistakes. It is worthwhile searching for variant spellings. Consider using wildcards to assist with this. Without wildcards your search terms only match on whole words. "Bill" matches Bill but not Billy. Bill* matches both.

Uncommon names provide more efficient searches. Common names, or names that are also words will require lots of sifting. Searching by service number is worthwhile.

When you open a claim in the search results the page highlights the images on which the search terms have been found. Depending on your search, not all your terms will be on all pages.If you open the search results in a new tab, the javascript that performs this highlighting will not work. You need to duplicate the current tab and then open the link within the duplicate.

Organizing

If you create an account and use the site whilst logged in then you can add tags to documents to help you retrieve them in future. You can also contribute transcriptions of images when logged in.