Records on web detail injuries, character, appearance and illnesses.
Where to trace your genealogy on the web.
Esther Addley
Wednesday August 8, 2007
Guardian
Like many men of his generation and experiences, Pattie Townsend’s father didn’t talk much about the Great War.She knew he had enlisted in 1914, full of excitement and pretending to be older than his 17 years. By the time he was discharged on December 22 1916 he had been gassed, received injuries to his left knee and forearm, and had part of his skull blown away, an injury that left him suffering from epilepsy for the rest of his life. Patrick Gould married twice, working for much of his life as a labourer on the docks in London, but when he died in 1975 he took with him most of his wartime secrets.Today, Mrs Townsend, 77, will be able to add a few more details to her father’s service history. The pension records of almost a million soldiers who served in the first world war have for the first time been made available on the internet, allowing descendants to access a wealth of information about anyone who was injured or discharged due to illness. The records are significant because as well as dry military facts – date of enlistment and discharge, records of rank and any medals won – the documents also record personal, occasionally very intimate details of illnesses contracted and injuries sustained, as well as meticulous records of next of kin, physical descriptions, even accounts of an injured soldier’s character.“What is so exciting is the amount of detail you can go into,” says Simon Harper, managing director of ancestry.co.uk, the genealogy website that has made the records available online. “Physical descriptions. Scars or injuries. Sometimes accounts of where they served and how they were injured.” On average, he says, the site holds 10 pages of records for each soldier listed.
The documents are not new; they have long been available at the National Archives in Kew, but until now could only be consulted in person. But because many British army records from the first world war were destroyed during the second, amateur historians and genealogists have often been unaware of the amount of information available, says William Spencer, senior military specialist at the National Archives.
“The key thing about this particular collection is that you can get all kinds of things relating to service personnel that you might not expect. A good example might be a chap who was in the army but was caught by the civil police as drunk and disorderly. You would get the records relating to his arrest in his file. Before the first world war, it wasn’t information they thought to keep.”
Other discoveries may be more delicate, he says. “These were human beings, not just soldiers, and they have human frailties. Someone might have had a major medical condition but the details of how they contracted it might be a surprise to their relatives.” Meaning sexually transmitted diseases? “A lot of people don’t like coming across that kind of information, but it was a fact of military life at that time.”
The process of scanning millions of pages of records, then inputting the neatly handwritten entries into a searchable format, has taken just a matter of months, says Mr Harper – but the expense of doing so means that after a free introductory period the site will charge for access to the files. “Well over a million” people in Britain were already registered with the site and were compiling family trees, he said.
“I’m often asked my view on the recent surge in interest in family history, but I don’t see it that way,” he said. “We have always been interested, because it makes up who we are. It’s just that the internet has enabled us to put so much material online.
“Everyone has heard their own stories. It’s how family history starts. You hear the stories, you come home and say, is that really true? One of our quietest times is on Christmas Day, but we get extremely busy the following week, as everyone tries to check out the stories.”
Mrs Townsend’s growing interest in genealogy has, with age, become an obsession, she admits. She recently completed a degree course in heritage studies, and is compiling family trees for each of her own and her husband’s parents. “Of course, in a way I do regret not asking my father about his wartime experiences, but of course we didn’t know about all that then, tracing our heritage. That was just how life was. In those days people didn’t worry their children with the bad facts of life.”