New look and new prices at findmypast.co.uk

Find My Past has a new look which promises to make navigation around the ever-populating site a good deal easier. Better still, the price of an annual subscription to the Full & Foundation package has reduced from £129.95 to £109.95, plus you still get the chance of a free 14-day trial.

The Cenotaph and the disappearing pram

Here we have several versions of the same image. and as far as the lady and the pram goes it's a case of now you see it:


Now you don't:


Now you see it:


Now you don't:


I'm not sure why it was felt necessary to remove the pram but versions with and without pram appear throughout the 1920s whilst everything else in this particular photograph remains the same.

Military glut on findmypast.co.uk

Find My Past has just released the following data sets:

1861 Worldwide Army Index
Paddington Rifles 1860-1912
Royal Fusiliers 1863-1905
Surrey Recruitment Registers 1908-1933

The 1861 Worldwide Army Index is a useful source of information if you can't find your relative on the 1861 census as it contains the name, regiment and station of nearly a quarter of a million British Army other ranks serving in Her Majesty's Army at home and overseas.


The Paddington Rifles information has been compiled from muster rolls and contains details such as enlistment date and the man's occupation.

The Royal Fusiliers data is comprised from medal rolls for the India General Service Medal (Umbeyla Campaign), Afghan War Medal, Canada General Service Medal, Queen's and King's South Africa Medal and the Tibet Medal.

Finally, last but by no means least, the Surrey Recruitment Registers contain the often rich details of men who enlisted in the British Army at various recruitment centres in Surrey between 1908 and 1933.

Hello militia

To mis-quote The Two Ronnies, "it's goodnight from armyancestry.co.uk and it's hello militia." I've abandoned the armyancestry website and will just use this blog to update new developments in British Army research. On that topic, I'm delighted to see that findmypast.co.uk has just published half a million militia records. Click on the links on this page to read more.

Using army numbers to trace service histories

Thanks to the efforts of the Luftwaffe during WW2, finding service records for WW1 soldiers can often be a frustrating task. However, if you know a man's number, all is not lost and there is still a lot that can be gleaned from it. For this post, I've taken a random number, 2345, and run a search on The National Archives site to see how many results are returned for "Essex". Here are the results:

3/2345 Pte J Winch
2345 Frank Martin, Essex Yeomanry
2345 John J Cook
2345 Arthur W Cranmer, 7th Essex
2345 Honace [sic] Thomas Reardon
2345 Henry W Williams

So, six results; one for the Essex Yeomanry and five for the Essex Regiment.

3/2345 Pte Winch served with the 3rd (Special Reserve) Battalion and his number tells me that he must have joined the battalion in the second week of August 1914.

2345 Frank Martin's number for the Essex Yeomanry dates to between June and October 1915.

2345 John J Cook's battalion is unclear.

2345 Arthur Cranmer served with the 7th Essex (that much is clear from the information stated on his card) and his number dates to early August 1914.

2345 Horace Reardon also has the number 275371 which indicates that he served with the 6th Battalion and joined up in September 1914

2345 Henry Williams' battalion is also unclear.

So by a process of elimination, John Cook and Henry Williams must have served with either the 1st or 2nd Battalions or the 4th or 5th Battalions. They cannot have served with service battalions as these numbers didn't start until around 12000.

If they had served with the regular battalions, they would have had to have enlisted around February 1888 and so we can pretty much rule this out as they would have been in their mid forties by the time Britain went to war. It's possible, but unlikely.

So we're left with the likelihood that the two men were also territorials, one serving with the 4th Battalion, the other with the 5th. A quick search on Soldiers Died in The Great War reveals that 2345 Henry Walter Williams was killed in action in August 1915 whilst serving with the 4th Essex Regiment. His number dates to September or October 1914. This leaves just John Cook, and the likelihood that he served with the 5th Essex Regiment, his number dating to around the 5th September 1914.

Just to round things off, I checked the numbers on Ancestry and found that Horace Reardon's service record survives in WO 363 and shows that he joined the 6th Essex on the 18th September 1914. No records for any of these men survive in WO 364; at least not that I have found.

The army number information, and tying in those numbers to actual or estimated dates of joining comes from my extensive database of army regimental numbers and I have a separate blog dedicated to this fascinating study.

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...

Operation Big Ben - WW2

Another offer from the Naval & Military Press, probably the world's premier military-book retailer. The blurb reads:

OPERATION BIG BEN
The Anti-V2 Spitfire Missions 1944-45

Published price £14.99 this weekend only £2.95

Best known for being the first presenter of Tomorrow's World Raymond Baxter had a active RAF career as a Spitfire Pilot.

Flying with No. 602 Squadron RAF in September 1944. On 18 March 1945, he took part in a daring daylight raid on the Shell-Mex building in The Hague, which was the HQ for V1 and V2 attacks. The commander, Max Sutherland, received a bar to his DFC and the other four pilots, including Baxter, were mentioned in dispatches.

In an interview he described flying over a V-2 rocket site during a launch, and his wingman firing on the missile: "I dread to think what would have happened if he'd hit the thing!"

This highly significant book draws attention to one of the best kept secrets of the Second World War. Through Squadron histories, log books, official reports and interviews with the people who flew clipped winged Spitfires to dive-bomb V2 rocket sites towards the end of World War 2, a story as fascinating as the Dam Busters Raid or the Battle of Britain is at last fully told. The authors explain the difficulties of the missions, utilising the firsthand recollections of the men who completed the dive-bombing raids. They show the extreme dangers and complexities of dive-bombing as well as how to dive-bomb, all of which is supported by lists of the Spitfires that flew with the squadrons and V1 and V2 target statistics. This book is an essential reading for all those interested in the Second World War.

Craig Cabell and Graham A. Thomas Forward by Raymond Baxter
SB 206 pp Illustrated

To find this very special "this weekend only offer" look in our “SPECIAL OFFERS” SECTION ON OUR WEB SITE.

Published price £14.99 this weekend only £2.95

Find My Past just became cheaper

It just became 10% cheaper to find your relatives. Click on the link to save on the price of a subscription to Find My Past. Go on, do it!

War Poets

From Martin Chown of the War Poets' Association:


"I am on the WPA Committee organising this first study tour to cover the
writings of two lesser known war poets Blunden and Rosenberg- the one who
died, and the one who survived.

A new approach to the literature and perspectives of the First World War
will be taken with this special study tour to the Battlefields on the 95th
anniversary of the Battle of the Somme in 1916. Fall In, Ghosts is the first
tour to feature specifically the contrasting experiences and writings of war
poets Edmund Blunden and Isaac Rosenberg, whose reputations at home and
abroad have grown steadily over the past ninety years.

The tour will follow, for Blunden, his classic account Undertones of War.
This has just been re-published by Penguin with a new introduction by
military historian Hew Strachan. Both poets will be illustrated by their
poetry at relevant sites.

I hope you will be able to pass this on to people who might appreciate this
new approach to the literature of the first World War, especially covering
lesser known poets whose voices and experiences covered two years of
warfare, whose poetry was either fortunate to be sent home and published, or
lost in the mud, and published later.

The flyer can be found directly on the website: www.warpoets.org and the
organisers have a closing date of 30 April 2011."

Army Ancestors on-line - 18th & 19th Centuries

This is a general overview of on-line sources to check. It is not complete and will be updated.

Find my 18th and 19th Century Army Ancestors

Find My Past has published the complete WO 97 series of Army pension records on-line. These, as the title suggests, are records for men who left the army between 1760 and 1913 and received a pension. There are over one million records in this series.

WO 96 is the series for militia attestations and covering the period 1806-1915. There are around 500,000 records in this series and these too will be available on the Find My Past website from September 2011.

Ancestry has the WO 363 and WO 364 series on its site. Although both record series are supposedly exclusively First World War series for soldiers' service papers and soldiers' pension papers respectively, there are many thousands of service records and pension records which pre-date WW1. The earliest I have found dates back to 1850.

Find My Past has:

Army Lists for 1787, 1798 and 1878 (Officers)
Peninsula Medal Roll 1793-1814
The Waterloo Medal Roll 1815
Harts' Army Lists for 1840 and 1888 (Officers)
Indian Army and Civil Service List 1873
Anglo Boer War Roll 1899-1902

Ancestry has:

UK military campaign & award rolls 1793-1949 (BUT excluding WW1 and WW2)
UK naval medal and award rolls (BUT excluding WW1 and WW2)
UK casualties of the Boer War 1899-1902 (inferior to the Find My Past roll)

Dix Noonan Webb has published the following FREE medal rolls:

Military General Service Medal 1793-1814
Naval General Service Medal 1793-1840
Army of India Medal 1799-1826
Indian Mutiny Medal 1857-1859

Finally, Kevin Asplin has nominal rolls, casualty rolls and medal rolls too numerous to mention on his hugely useful site.