How To Find Out About Your Military Ancestors
How To Find Out About Your Military Ancestors
Army ancestry is fascinating and you will find that once you begin investigating you just cannot stop.
Luckily now there are plenty of places where you can easily receive help with finding out about ancestors from British army ranks. The easiest place to get started is actually at home simply by collecting as much information as possible from your own family.
Your family members may hold critical details that has been passed down through the generations. Ask them to remember as much as possible and to check in lofts and scrapbooks for any further evidence.
Just finding out a name can easily set you on the right path but to have a photograph or medals might bring your relative ever nearer. You may come across old postcards, newspaper clippings, parish magazine cuttings, pay books, drawings, maps, military cap badges, buttons from uniforms or battle souvenirs such as brass shell cases. If you are lucky you may well find some trench art' - battle souvenirs etched with pictures. Medals from 1914-18 are helpful finds as all servicemen had their name, rank and number written upon them.
Your family may also be able to point you to graves that include information regarding your relative.
When you have as much information from your family as possible, it is a good plan to make The National Archives in London your next port of call. They have continuous paper records from 1750 but also medical records and discharge papers from earlier dates. You may find unit war diaries mentioning your family member, or records of gallantry and campaign medals which will give further insights into your relative's military life.
All through the 1914-18 period, casualty lists were published every day in national papers and will also be recorded in local papers, therefore a trip to the library to look at the microfilms is a very good idea.
The Commonwealth War Graves Commission keeps details on the 1.7 million service personnel who died on operations since 1914 so are worth looking up if your relative died while in one of the world wars.
Try a search of the Ceremonial and Heritage section of the Ministry of Defence website for useful facts of all the nation's regimental and military museums.
Visiting an army museum can make everything a bit more real for you and allow you to have abetter comprehension about military life at the time of your ancestor.
Arranging an appointment at The Imperial War Museum, London, will allow you to view the extensive collection of diaries, memoirs and letters held in the Department of Documents. You can find out about your relative's unit and what their life would have been like. They also have pictures and paintings that may be of interest and they have a comprehensive selection of army lists.
The National Army Museum, Chelsea, has a substantial range of artefacts, and is particularly good on uniforms so could be worth popping in on if you are in London.
Regimental museums are a goldmine of valuable information and most regiments have got one. Over the last few centuries, many regiments have been disbanded or amalgamated and new ones have been created. However, a list of army museums can be found on the website of the Army Museums Ogilby Trust who are based in Salisbury.
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