an excellent guide to finding your military ancestors…

Your Military Ancestors and how to find them. 

Using Ancestry, Find My Past and the National Archives…

Occasionally family history research will turn up information about an ancestor who served in the armed forces at some point in their lives. This may have been one small part of their story, or it may have been the end of their story.

Here is some guidance about finding records of their service or other details about their lives.

1. Ancestry Library Edition

Ancestry has a link on the front page to military records where you can search for a specific person, as broadly or specifically as you can. You can also look at all the databases in their card catalogue if you want to browse a record set you know your ancestor is included in, or just see what is out there.

Once you click on “View all in Card Catalogue” you will find another search page where you can use keywords to find the relevant databases.

Remember: if you are using your own Ancestry subscription, not all the records that appear will be visible to you. You can access the library subscription at home whilst we are not open. You will be able to see records from outside the UK and Europe if you do this.

2. FindMyPast

As with Ancestry, you can go straight to military records via “Search” and begin looking for a specific person across all records.

Within that search page, you can refine your search to only include certain types of military records, see a guide to searching military records, and find information about what is available for each country.

Remember: not every record shown on FindMyPast is accessible with the library subscription. If you find a record that you then cannot open, try to find it again using Ancestry. There is a great deal of overlap between the two resources, so you never know! You can access Find My Past from home whilst we are not open.  Find out how to access  Find my past and Ancestry websites here

3. The National Archives

The National Archives website has historical military records as well as guides for how to access and navigate searches in different time periods or conflicts. Go to “find online collections” from the front page and you can immediately begin to refine and search for military records.

https://nationalarchives.gov.uk/

You can also explore their catalogue and search for an individual this way. From here, general information about what is included in each record and the cost of obtaining a copy is visible. You can decide whether those records would be helpful to your research or not.

4. Imperial War Museum

The IWM features lengthy articles about conflicts and record sets. You may not be able to find information on individuals here, but for more context about events and history this website is invaluable.

Scrolling down to “digitisation programme” will show you what documents and photographs can be accessed remotely. Viewing any other collections will involve a visit to the museum itself.

There are items in their collection which are relevant to the Duke of Wellington regiments, which leads us to a local source of information: Bank-field Museum, which hosts the Duke of Wellington’s Regiment Museum. Some items are on display there but if you need more information, contact the DWR itself. A full explanation of what they are able to provide and where else to find information can be found on their website at:

http://www.dwr.org.uk/regimental-family-history-research

5. Weaver to Web

Weaver to Web is an extensive collection of photographs and documents covering the history of Calderdale from medieval times up to the present. The “WW1 Newspapers” section gives you access not only to scans of the Halifax Courier from 1914-1918 but also a searchable pdf of the “Calderdale War Dead” book which covers WW1 and WW2.

There are also searchable PDFs of birth, marriage and death notices from the Courier for these soldiers so if this is where you are starting with your family tree you can find quite a lot of information to then go back to Ancestry or FindMyPast to continue going backwards into your family tree.

https://calderdale.gov.uk/wtw/sources/themes/world-war-one.html

Now that you have a few starting points for your research, see how far you can get on your own. If you get stuck, don’t hesitate to contact the local studies team at reference.library@calderdale.gov.uk even during lockdown — we are more than happy to advise you on technical issues or “where next?” enquiries.

Access Find my Past and Ancestry here