Has every search for your great grandfather’s First World War service record come back empty? You haven’t done anything wrong. More than half of the service records of the soldiers who fought in that war were destroyed during the Blitz in 1940, when an air raid set fire to the War Office record store in Arnside Street, Walworth. So the empty search is normal. And the record you need first isn’t the service record anyway. It’s his number.
Why the service record is so often missing
What survived the fire is now in two series at The National Archives, both searchable on Ancestry and Findmypast. WO 363, known as the ‘burnt documents’, holds what came out of the store, much of it charred at the edges and some of it no more than a page. WO 364, the ‘unburnt documents’, holds papers kept by the Ministry of Pensions rather than in the store, mostly for men discharged through wounds or sickness.
If his record survives it can be extraordinary: his height and chest measurement, his trade, his next of kin, the address he gave and the age he claimed (not always his real one, as I explained in the post about census ages). If it doesn’t survive, that tells you about a bomb in 1940, not about him. A man with no service record still left plenty of other paper behind.
Find his number first
In First World War records a name on its own is close to useless. A common Lancashire name can bring back dozens of men of the right age, and the indexes can’t tell them apart. The regimental number can. Each man had one, and it follows him through every record that survives, so the technique is simple: find the number before you look for anything else.
Start at home, because families kept the evidence without knowing it. Turn over any campaign medals you have. The British War Medal and the Victory Medal were impressed around the rim with the man’s number, rank, name and unit, although officers’ medals leave out the regiment. A photograph in uniform shows a cap badge, and the badge names the regiment. Letters home, a pay book or a printed battalion Christmas card can carry the number too. If he didn’t come home, the bronze memorial plaque sent to his next of kin, the ‘dead man’s penny’, gives his name but deliberately no rank, so it confirms the man without giving you the number.
Then go to the medal index cards. There are over five million of them, series WO 372, searchable on The National Archives’ website and on the subscription sites, and they cover most soldiers who served overseas. A card gives his name, rank, unit and number, the medals he was entitled to, and often the date he first entered a theatre of war. Men who served only at home earned no campaign medals, so they usually have no card.
The card proves a soldier, but it doesn’t prove he’s your soldier. For that I use the absent voters lists, compiled in 1918 and 1919 when servicemen were registered to vote at their home address. Each entry gives a man’s number, rank and unit against the house he came from. When the number on the medal card sits beside your family’s street, the identity is settled. The lists are held by county record offices and libraries, and some are on Findmypast. They’re not perfect, because some men were missed and some details were taken down wrongly, so treat them as a check rather than a starting point.
Following the battalion
Once you know his battalion, you can follow it. Every unit kept a war diary, now in series WO 95, recording where it was and what it did, day by day. Diaries rarely name private soldiers, but they tell you which village, which trench and which morning, and the date of entry on his medal card tells you when he joined them.
In Lancashire the battalion is often the story. The Pals battalions of 1914 were raised from single towns, and the 11th Battalion of the East Lancashire Regiment, the Accrington Pals, drew its four companies from Accrington, Burnley, Chorley and Blackburn. On 1 July 1916, the first day of the Somme, about 720 of them went into action at Serre. In about half an hour 585 were casualties, 235 of them killed. Men from the same mill towns had enlisted together, and they fell together. It’s why some Lancashire memorials carry several names from one street beside one date.
If he did not come home
The Commonwealth War Graves Commission’s free Find War Dead database covers everyone in the forces who died between the outbreak of war and 31 August 1921. The entry gives his grave or the memorial that carries his name, and often a line of additional information: “Son of Thomas and Mary Ashworth, of Church Street, Haslingden” is the sort of sentence that ties a soldier to a family at a stroke.
The soldiers’ effects registers, held by the National Army Museum, record the money owed to every soldier who died in service and who received it, usually a mother, a father or a widow. The volumes up to 1929 are searchable on Ancestry. And the local paper ran its roll of honour, often with a photograph sent in by the family, which may be the only picture of him that survives anywhere. I have written before that when the official records go quiet, the local paper often keeps talking. Between 1914 and 1919 it rarely stopped.
The honest limits
Some soldiers can’t be pinned down. A common name with no number, no medals in the family and no surviving service record can leave two or three candidates who all fit - and I’ll tell you so rather than choose one for you. Officers have their own records, in different series. And men who served after 1920 are a different problem again: their service records are only now being transferred from the Ministry of Defence to The National Archives, a process expected to finish by the end of 2027. That deserves a post of its own.
Where I come in
Military service turns up in a great many of the trees I research, and when it does it goes into the story that comes with every package; in the Gold package it becomes a page of his own in the family history book, his war set among the rest of his life. If the soldier is the whole point, and you want one man followed from enlistment to the end of his war, that is tailor-made research, with the price agreed before I start.
Is there a soldier in your family you have never been able to find? Get in touch and tell me his name, roughly where he lived and anything the family kept, and I will tell you honestly what the records are likely to hold.