If a man left his unit after wound, sickness or injury, there was no guarantee that he would be posted back to his original unit or regiment. This became increasingly the case as the war went on. So if he had joined his local unit, he may be with a totally different one by war’s end." - Chris Baker, the Long, Long Trail website
I assume that you haven't been able to locate his service records, so all you have to go on is his medal index cards or the medal rolls. Does the MIC say when he went overseas to France? For example the 6th (Service) Battalion KSLI landed at Boulogne-Sur-Mer as part of the 60th Brigade in the 20th (Light) Division in July 1915 for service on the Western Front, whereas the 1/5th Battalion South Lancs landed at Le Havre as part of the 12th Brigade in the 4th Division in February 1915.
The second way you may be able to narrow down the date of his transfer is to take the number he was given on joining the South Lancs, then using either Ancestry or FindMyPast (FindMyPast Is better for this) put his number and South Lancashire Regiment in the search terms, but omit all other details. Before you search replace the last digit of his number with an asterisk. Do a search. If you get any results, check each one to see if the soldier's documents have survived and if so note when he enlisted or was transferred to the South Lancs. Depending if his number was before or after that of the soldier you are interested in, this gives you a clue to your man's transfer date as numbers were issued in strict chronological order. Frankly I would be amazed if you got a result first time as you are looking at 10 individuals, so you will probably need to repeat the exercise using asterisks in place of the last two digits, and so on until you get something you can work with. The ideal is to get one soldier with a number several higher and another with a number several lower than your man so you have a bracket of dates.
Just to confuse matters, in 1917 members to the Territorial Force were all given new numbers. If your man's second number is six digits long and starts with 2, that number will have been allocated to him as a result of this reorganisation, and not necessarily be related to the date when he transferred to the South Lancs. If this appears to be the case with your man, and you can locate his name on the Medal Rolls (on Ancestry) he will have a double line entry showing his former number in that battalion and his new number, along with the date of the changeover. (see this article on the Long, Long Trail website:
https://www.longlongtrail.co.uk/soldiers/a-soldiers-life-1914-1918/renumbering-of-the-territorial-force-in-1917/)
I hope this helps rather than confuses!
More information of both Battalions
KSLI here and
South Lancs here
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Topic: Changed regiment (Read 898 times)