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Military Records

From the first day of service to the last, careers in the Forces are well documented.

Enlistment, active service, discipline & punishment, medical records, medal rolls, discharge papers; all these events and more were recorded and followed every serviceman and woman through their careers.

Many of these records survive.

Medal Rolls

WW1 Campaign Medal Rolls are held on DocumentsOnline at The National Archives, where it is free to search.

A search through these indexes will provide you with a first and second name, corps, regimental number, and rank, so it will generally be fairly easy to identify whether or not any of the records are the ones you want.

If so, a copy of the Medal Card can be purchased online for £2.

The Medal Card may give details of the medal/s awarded and the campaign/s in which your ancestor saw action.

War Graves

The Commonwealth War Graves Commission (CWGC) is a non-profit-making organisation whose mission is to commemorate every one of the 1,700,000 Commonwealth troops who lost their lives during the two World Wars.

In addition, 67,000 civilians lost their lives in World War II and they are included in this project.

The intention is to erect a headstone over the grave of every man and woman killed, and where there are no known remains will inscribe the names on permanent memorials.

The headstones and memorials will be placed wherever in the world, wherever the personnel died, and to date, over 1,000,000 such memorials have been placed in over 150 countries. The remaining 700,000 is an ongoing project.

Their database is searchable, and there is no cost to locate the grave of your family member. The index will give you the age and date of death (where known), together with rank, regiment, unit, regimental number, and the grave or memorial reference.

From this it is possible to locate the position of the grave.

The War Graves Photographic Project, in association with CWGC is undertaking a project to photograph all war graves from World War 1 to the present day. The project isn't complete, but their database is added to regularly.

Currently they have just under a million photographs, and update the database regularly.

Through their website it is possible to purchase photographs - £5 for a hard copy photograph, and £3 for an e-mail copy.

Service records and pension records

By the end of the First World War more than 7 million men and women had served in the British Army, and at the end of their service their records were transferred to, and held at the War Office archives in London.

In 1940 a German bomb struck the War Office and more than half of the records were destroyed.

Approximately 2.8 million survived, or have been reconstructed from records held at the Ministry of Pensions. Because of fire and water damage these documents - known as the 'Burnt Documents' - are too delicate to be handled, and are only available on microfilm.

These images are held at The National Archives, but it is not possible to view or download them there.

The National Archives have joined with Ancestry.com to allow access to the records. Searching the database is free, but to see any records you find will require a paid subscription.

These records contain a lot of valuable family information - marital status, name of spouse, date of marriage, home address, names of children and their dates of birth, date of enlistment, nature of disability, profession prior to enlisting, and more.


Discover your ancestors at Genes Reunited.co.uk