Ancestry.co.uk has just released the Medal Index Cards for the First World War http://www.ancestry.co.uk/military. There was a huge amount of publicity over this and many people may have got the impression that it is the first time that these records have become available. In fact, they have been on TNA’s DocumentsOnline service http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/documentsonline for a number of years. Ancestry does offer several distinct advantages over DocumentsOnline: first the quality of the scanning is superb, and secondly you get to see both sides of the card. In most cases there is no additional information, but in about 50,000 cases the back provides an address, but occasionally there are notes about other medals awarded or other data. Unfortunately the indexing seems to be pretty poor.* I particularly wanted to find the card for my unlucky great-uncle Pte Henry P S Crozier, 18th London Regiment who was killed in the last week of the war. I couldn’t find him in the Ancestry service, although he was easy enough to find on DocumentsOnline, along with lots of other Croziers who do not seem to appear in Ancestry. I tried other names as well and DocumentsOnline constantly came up with more results than Ancestry. In general I do find searching the various Ancestry databases increasingly difficult and certainly more frustrating than rival sites. Using the censuses on Genes Reunited http://www.genesreunited.co.uk, for example, seems easier and more accurate. But of course it may just be me. I’d be interested to hear about your experiences. *Since writing this I have been contacted by Ancestry’s Simon Ziviani who points out that only "2.1 million names [from the medal cards] were launched last week – the remaining 3.4 million will go live in the coming weeks, meaning that at this stage there is a less than 50% chance that your relative’s name would be contained."
The work on improving the reading room progresses apace. From Monday (25 February) an extra fifty seats will be made available in the Document Reading Room and this should help relieve pressure on seats. In addition the staff canteen reopens, so fewer people will be using the new public restaurant. And personally speaking it will mean less of a walk to buy the strong cups of tea, which in time-honoured Civil Service tradition sustains the Ancestors Magazine editorial team.
Continue reading about Progress with the building work at Kew
We regularly receive letters from readers who have ancestors who emigrated to South America before 1914. This part of the 19th century emigration story has almost been forgotten, but thousands of people were attracted to South America to farm, build railways or work in the mines, as is clear from the online outward passenger lists available at http://www.ancestorsonboard.com. The largest British community was in Buenos Aires, although there was sizeable communities in most large cities and port towns. It can be very difficult to track these people, because genealogy is only beginning to take off here and the records tend to be in Spanish or Portuguese. Help, however, may well come from the Brits in South America Index at http://www. bisa.btinternet.co.uk which has details of thousands of British and Irish people who were attracted to the continent, although it doesn’t pretend to be complete. It is also simply designed with links to other relevant sites – the perfect place to start research as exotic as this!
Continue reading about Website of the week – Brits in South America
