New military releases on Findmypast

Findmypast has recently made some major changes to its military collection.

For a start, the two service record collections which were previously known as British Army Service Records 1760-1915 and British Army Service Records 1914-1920 have now been merged into a single collection called simply British Army Service Records. This is a great improvement a) because the British Army Service Records 1914-1920 collection contained records going back a good way before 1914 anyway, and b) because it is now possible to see men who have files in more than one WO category.

Furthermore, Findmypast has also added to its store of WO records. New releases launched at the same time include the following series:

WO 76 - Regimental records of officers' services 1775-1914
Information varies but usually contains brief details of service. I found this particularly useful when I was looking at officers who had served in the Scottish Rifles.

WO 339 - Officers' services, First World War, regular army and emergency reserve officers 
This series is presented on Findmypast as index-only. The transcripts were created from records and correspondence related to officers in the regular army and the emergency reserve during the First World War. These records have not yet been digitised but can be viewed in their original state at The National Archives, Kew, London.

WO 374 - Officers' services, First World War, personal files 
This is an index of men who served as officers in the British Army during the First World War. Original papers for these men can be viewed in their original state at The National Archives, Kew, London. 
  
WO 400 - The Household Cavalry 1801-1919 
The Household Cavalry comprised the 1st Life Guards, 2nd Life Guards and the Royal Horse Guards. During the First World War, a fourth regiment, The Household Battalion, was also raised, and this collection contains the service records of non-commissioned officers and men who served with all four regiments. 

Findmypast also has also indexed WO 363 and WO 364 more comprehensively than Ancestry, although you'll still need Ancestry for medal index cards, medal rolls, soldiers effects register and war diaries (if you can find what you are looking for on their perplexing index, I might add).

I say it again and again, but there probably has never been a better time to be a family (or military) historian - and next week will probably be better still. And to think I used to have to trek up to Kew thirty years ago. The youngsters today, they don't know they were born!

Searching WO 363 & WO 364 on findmypast

Findmypast's release of First World War service records from the WO 363 and WO 364 series held on microfilm at The National Archives is a MAJOR boon for anyone wishing to search these important documents. Due to the poor state of WO 363 in particular, searching these records on Ancestry has never been particularly easy, but findmypast's indexing is, I believe, far superior. For a start, you can search records across WO 363 and WO 364 simultaneously. On Ancestry, you need to conduct two separate searches. Furthermore nearly 600,000 records never previously indexed by Ancestry are now available on findmypast for the first time.  Here are some simple tips to help you get the best out of the search engine.

First, above all else, let wildcard search do the work. My particular interest is in regimental numbers and so typically I'm looking for particular number ranges for specific regiments.  My first tip would be, don't try to type in the full regiment name. Use fragments and the asterisk wildcard to get the maximum results.  In the example below, I was looking for men who served with the North Somerset Yeomanry and so this is what I typed in the regiment field:

 

I also wanted to find men who had numbers in the 600 range and so this is what I typed in the service number field:

 

 

This gave me 23 results, some of which (click on the images to enlarge) are shown below:

 

 

As you can see, it is now very easy to identify numbers in the 600 range and to discount those which are either too high - like 642961 - or too low.

 

Results with a either a birth year or a birth county against them will generally yield full results: service or pension papers or similar. Those with nothing showing in these fields are generally (but not always) men who appear on lists - often lists of casualty returns, transfers to hospitals or convalescent depots, or transfers to other regiments. This is certainly the case with 638 Dickinson, above, whose entry (at the bottom) appears like this:

 

 



These lists of men form the vast majority of those additional 600,000 names which findmypast has captured, and in the majority of cases this may be the only reference to a particular soldier which survives.  In order to see the context in which this document appears, findmypast also identifies the original source document, or originating record. To view this record, click on the "view transcription" button whilst you are looking at the image above:

 

In Corporal Dickinson's case this is what we see:

 

 

So we now know that this single page, identifying Corporal Dickinson as having been transferred to a hospital ship with a shrapnel wound to his right shoulder, appears within the service record for R/13933 George William Neve of the Grenadier Guards. (In actual fact, as any regimental numbers expert will tell you, R/13933 is not a Grenadier Guards number. Neve originally served with the KRRC, later transferring to the Guards. But these are often tough records to index - heavily edited documents at the time the man was serving which have not been helped by subsequent fire and water damage).

Nevertheless, if you wanted to see why Dickinson appears in Neve's papers, you are able to call up Neve's record. I did so and could find no earthly connection between this hospital return - which does not include Neve's name - and Neve's record; a prime example of a piece of paper slipped, accidentally perhaps, into another man's service record. But I guess that's by the by. Use wildcard searching and you won't go far wrong.

Army Deserters 1828-1840

There are some great Army Deserter records over on findmypast; records that make a nice complement to the Chelsea Pensioner records in WO 97.

Thanks to the efforts of the Manchester and Lancashire Family History Society, it's possible to view the details of over 34,000 men who deserted the British Army between 1828 and 1840. At an average of 2,615 desertions per annum over the thirteen years that the database covers, that seems like a lot of men. According to figures published in Alan Ramsay Skelley's The Victorian Army at Home (Croom Helm, London, 1977) however, those numbers are par for the course.  In 1862, 2,895 men deserted (1.4 per cent of the British Army as a whole) and over the next thirty-six years, the figure never dropped below that 1862 level and in fact rose as high as 5,861 in 1872; 3.2 per cent of the British Army.

There are plenty of service records in WO 97, and in fact in the WO 363 and WO 364 series for the First World War which show men having deserted.  Many of these men however, were recaptured or returned of their own free will and went on to lead distinguished careers.  I have noticed during my own research, that most soldiers who did desert, often did so within the first year (and sometimes even days or weeks) of joining.  As Skelley suggests, talking about the number of soldiers of the Home Army in prison:

"... younger soldiers were more prone to commit offences or at least were more likely to be caught for doing so, than older, more experienced men who by the time they had served six or seven years would have beome accustomed to the demands of military life, would have had the maturity to cope with the demands and might have achieved greater responsibility and greater freedom with promotion."

Deserters, when caught, could expect to be flogged or branded.  Although flogging was later restricted by the Mutiny Act of 1868 to active service and to certain offences committed while under sentence in military prisons, and later still (1881, the Army Discipline and Regulation Act) restricted to military prisons only, it wasn't until 1906 that corporal punishment in military prisons was abolished altogether.

The image below, taken from the Army Deserters 1828-40 data on findmypast shows you the type of information you can expect to find.  The image at the top of this post dates to 1884 and shows a deserter having been apprehended.

Wildcard military search on Findmypast and Ancestry

I must have searched tens of thousands of military records online and so I write this post with some degree of authority.

I should say at the outset that I find both sites to be a fantastic resource. For the First World War enthusiast, Ancestry has the service records in WO 363, the pension records in WO 364 and the WW1 medal index cards. That's pretty much a full set of WW1 records for other ranks and is an invaluable research tool. Ancestry also has the UK Military Campaign Medal and Award Rolls 1793-1949 AND the UK Naval Medal and Award Rolls 1793-1972. Given such an extensive catalogue, it almost seems churlish to mention that the two medal roll collections DO NOT include the rolls for WW1 and WW2.

For its part, findmypast.co.uk has the WO 97 Chelsea Pensioner records 1760-1913 and the militia records in WO 96 between 1760 and 1915. That latter end date should be treated with a degree of caution as I've yet to find a militia record for 1915, and in fact by 1915 the milita had been long dead, replaced by the Special Reserve in 1908. Nevertheless, these record sets are extremely valuable and complement the records on Ancestry very nicely. Findmypast has more related military records coming up soon and one presumes they'll be of the same high quality as those in WO 96 and WO 97.

So plenty there for the military historian and on both sites you can search across regiments without having to input the name of a soldier. Findmypast provides a handy drop-down list of regiments whilst on Ancestry you have to input the name of the regiment yourself. This can be handy, providing that your spelling is up to scratch, but it also means that if you type in "fusilier" in the regiment box, you'll get results for the Royal Fusiliers, Northumberland Fusiliers, Lancashire Fusiliers, Royal Dublin Fusiliers, etc.

However, the main search difference between the two sites is the wildcard facility on search. On findmypast, if you're looking for, let's say, a Coldstream Guardsman with the number beginning with 3, you simply have to type in 3* in the soldier number box. You can use the wildcard asterisk on any combination of numbers. So typing 35* would bring up numbers beginning 35; 356* would bring up numbers beginning 356, and so on. You can even type 3*7 which would bring up all those numbers beginning with 3 and ending with 7. The flexibility that this type of searching offers has to be a good thing.

For reasons known only to itself however, Ancestry does not allow wildcard searching on any number or letter search of less than, or more than, three numbers or letters. So if you knew that your Coldstream Guard ancestor's service number began with 3, typing in 3* would bring up page explaining why your search hasn't worked. That's a shame because it would appear that a simple change in the algorithm could give Ancestry searches the same flexibility that you get over on findmypast, and with many of the burnt documents in WO 363 displaying burnt or water-damaged numbers, we researchers need all the help we can get.

I'm not sure where the image comes from that I've used to illustrate this post but I'll be happy to acknowledge the source if the owner gets in touch.

Victorian service in WO 363 and WO 364

It's a common misconception that WO 363 and WO 364 are the sole preserve of service and pension records respectively for First World War servicemen. They're not. There are thousands of pre-WW1 service records and Victorian Army service records to be found here and whilst some of the men may have still played some role during 1914-1918, or at least volunteered for service during the Great War, many did not.

Take one of my medal group men, Colour-Sergeant Charles Smith of the King's Shropshire Light Infantry, for instance. I've written Charles on my British Army Medals blog. He appears in a photo of D Company's football team after they'd won the Company Challenge Shield in 1895/1896. I first looked for him in the British Army Service Records 1760-1915 collection on Find My Past. There was nothing there. So I had a look over on Ancestry lo and behold, there he was, nine pages in the WO 364 Pension Records. I keyed in his number and as if by magic he appeared. There would have been no point searching on Shropshire for the regiment because Charles joined up in 1879, prior to the existence of the KSLI. Instead, he's indexed as belonging to the 53rd Regiment of Foot. Charles was discharged in 1908, six years before the the First World War began, but having served nearly 30 years in the Army.

And what about the man whose attestation paper I've used to illustrate this post? This particular document dates to 1850 and is the earliest attestation I've come across so far in the WO 364 Pension Records. This man would have been 82 years old in 1914!

So don't rule out the so-called First World War records just because your man had been discharged from the Army before then. There are plenty of Victorian British Army ancestors to be found in WO 363 and WO 364.

Ancestry - WO 364

Ive just noticed, somewhat belatedly perhaps that you can now search by regiment on Ancestry's digitised WO 364 series. It was always a big frustration for me that you couldn't do that when the series was first published. Well done Ancestry. Now if only you could search across both WO 363 and WO 364 at the same time on name, regiment and number...