Parsing 65 000 war grave records with Python

The second data set I chose to import in my project is the Commonwealth War Grave Commission’s 65 000 grave listings.

Compared to the previous data set, it a walk in the park: a large, properly formatted CSV file containing accurate, normalized information. If only it was always this simple!

ordered_column_names = ( # Ordered as they appear in the CSV file
    'surname',
    'given_name',
    'initials',
    'age_text',
    ...
)
column_count = len(ordered_column_names)

with open(filename, 'r') as csvfile:
    csv_reader = csv.reader(csvfile, delimiter=',', quotechar='"')
    for row in csv_reader:
        war_grave = dict(zip(ordered_column_names, row))

The resulting data only had one minor problem: the servicenumberexport column values were quoted with single quotes which needed to be removed.

with open(filename, 'r') as csvfile:
    csv_reader = csv.reader(csvfile, delimiter=',', quotechar='"')
    for row in csv_reader:
        war_grave = dict(zip(ordered_column_names, row))

    if len(war_grave['servicenumberexport']) and war_grave['servicenumberexport'][0] == "'":
        war_grave['servicenumberexport'] = war_grave['servicenumberexport'][1:-1]

Refining the data

After getting the data into the database, I was pleased to find that the date of death was normalized and valid. I changed the schema and refined the script to save date objects.

with open(filename, 'r') as csvfile:
    # ...
    for row in csv_reader:
        # ...
        for field in ('date_of_death1', 'date_of_death2'):
            if len(war_grave[field]):
                raw_date = war_grave[field]
                war_grave[field] = datetime(int(raw_date[6:10]), int(raw_date[3:5]), int(raw_date[0:2]))
            else:
                war_grave[field] = None

Likewise, the age column was always numeric or empty, so I converted it to a SMALLINT field:

war_grave['age'] = int(war_grave['age']) if len(war_grave['age']) else None

Caveats

Perhaps the most important thing to note is the significance of the date of death. Since these records are about war graves and not military casualties, not every enlistee in the records died during the war, or as a result of military activities. As a typical example, Sgt. Nassau Briggs died in 1921 from sickness, and was subsequently buried in a military cemetery.

Quick facts

I have not yet connected this data set with the previously parsed Canadian Expeditionary Force dataset, but without doing any fancy querying, we can already extract a few interesting facts from this data set.

• 23 enlistees died at 15 years old. 478 died before they turned 18.
• The oldest casualty was Reverent Robert Ker, who died at 75 years old.
• The median age of death is 26 years old, and the average is 27.

Further reading

You can find the code used to parse this data set on GitHub. You can read more about this data set on the Library and Archives Canada website.

This article is part of a series on Canadians at war, a project that aims to link and visualize open data about Canadians in the First World War. You can find the next article in the series here.