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.
